On 4 June 2026, the Japanese city of Hiroshima hosted the G7 for the second time in three years—and the mood was less triumphant than funereal. The joint communiqué, issued after two sleepless nights of negotiation, read like a dispatch from a world that had stopped pretending. It acknowledged “systemic strain on the rules-based international order,” flagged “persistent fragmentation in trade and technology governance,” and called for “a renewed compact among democracies.” Even the language of compromise felt hollow. The communiqué was hollow, too, in what it left out: no concrete new tariff-reduction pledges, no binding climate finance milestones, and not a single new security guarantee for Ukraine. The global order that Washington midwifed in the 1940s and expanded after the Cold War is now visibly fracturing—and America, more than any other country, is living inside the cracks.
The picture is more complicated than the usual declinism. America’s frustration with the institutions it created is real and bipartisan. Yet the instinct to walk away from global order confuses fatigue with strategy. The United States does not merely uphold the international system out of altruism. It depends on that system—for its own prosperity, its security, and even its domestic social contract. And because the U.S. still commands an unmatched combination of military reach, financial centrality, and alliance depth, it remains the only power capable of restoring a functioning order. The question is not whether America should try, but whether it recognises what it stands to lose if it doesn’t.
Why does the United States depend on the global order?
Because no major American priority—containing inflation, securing supply chains, managing AI risk, deterring China—can be achieved unilaterally. The global order provides the institutional plumbing that turns U.S. resources into durable outcomes. Abandon it, and Washington faces ad hoc bilateralism that weakens its leverage and multiplies liabilities, from trade discrimination to dollar displacement.
The Core Development
The rules-based global order was never a single document or a fixed set of institutions. It was a bet—placed by American statecraft after two world wars—that open markets, collective security, and binding norms would serve U.S. interests better than spheres-of-influence rivalry. For eight decades, that bet paid out. The dollar’s reserve-currency role gave Washington exorbitant privilege. NATO extended a security umbrella that prevented great-power war. The World Trade Organization and its predecessor the GATT enabled the tripling of global trade as a share of GDP, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and creating the consumer base for America’s largest corporations. Today, nearly 40% of the revenue of S&P 500 firms comes from outside the United States, according to Goldman Sachs research. The global order isn’t a gift America gives the world. It’s the infrastructure of American economic power.
That infrastructure is crumbling. Cross-border capital flows fell 12% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, the Institute of International Finance reported on 2 June, the sharpest quarterly contraction since the early pandemic. The World Trade Organization’s latest trade barometer, released in late May, shows merchandise trade volumes stagnating below trend for the fourth consecutive quarter. Geopolitical rivalries have weaponised interdependence: export controls on advanced semiconductors now cover more than 60 categories of technology, up from 12 in 2020, per the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The IMF’s June 2026 staff discussion note on geoeconomic fragmentation warns that a full decoupling of the global economy into rival blocs could shave between 5% and 7% off world GDP over the long term—a loss equivalent to erasing the entire output of Japan and Germany combined. For the U.S., the note calculates, the permanent income loss would be roughly $1.4 trillion annually by 2035.
Security arrangements are fraying at the same pace. Russia’s grinding war on Ukraine has not, as some hoped, reinvigorated the NATO alliance into a durable new consensus. Instead, it has exposed fissures over burden-sharing, nuclear signalling, and the limits of economic sanctions. Meanwhile, in the Indo-Pacific, China’s military modernisation proceeds without a credible regional security architecture to channel it. The annual SIPRI report released in April 2026 shows that global military spending has now surpassed $2.5 trillion for the first time, with Asia and Oceania accounting for the largest regional increase. The post-1945 wager is being undone by the very multipolarity it was designed to manage.
What has changed, however, is not the structural logic of American dependence on the system. It’s the domestic political consensus that sustained it. And that consensus can be rebuilt.
Why the United States Cannot Afford Disorder
Why does the United States depend on the global order? Because no major American priority—containing inflation, securing supply chains, slowing climate change, managing AI risk, deterring China—can be achieved unilaterally. The global order, for all its flaws, provides the institutional plumbing that turns American resources into durable outcomes. Abandon it, and Washington is left with ad hoc bilateralism that weakens its leverage while multiplying its liabilities.
Take trade. The U.S. is party to 14 free-trade agreements covering 20 countries, but the WTO’s most-favoured-nation principle effectively extends the benefits of low tariffs to all 166 members. A world in which that principle collapses is a world in which U.S. exporters face a patchwork of discriminatory tariffs, a direct threat to the 41 million American jobs that the Business Roundtable estimates depend on trade. The alternative—a chain of bilateral deals—would demand negotiating capacity Washington simply does not have. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative currently employs fewer than 250 people. It took seven years to conclude the U.S.-Kenya Strategic Trade and Investment Partnership, which remains unratified.
Finance reveals an even deeper dependency. The dollar’s dominance is not a law of nature. It rests on the depth of U.S. Treasury markets, the credibility of the Federal Reserve, and—crucially—the network effects of a global system that prices commodities, settles derivatives, and parks reserves in dollars because the alternative infrastructure does not exist yet. The Federal Reserve’s 2025 Triennial Survey showed that the dollar’s share of allocated foreign-exchange reserves remained above 58%, but the trend line is down from 71% in 2000. A fractured global order accelerates the search for alternatives. China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System now processes more than ¥2.5 trillion per quarter. The BRICS grouping, expanded in 2024, continues to explore a common settlement currency. These efforts are not yet mature enough to dethrone the dollar. Still, they reveal a clear direction of travel. A global order that sidelines the U.S. is a global order that eventually sidelines the dollar—and with it, America’s ability to run fiscal deficits at low cost and project financial power without firing a shot.
Then there is the security calculus. America’s alliances—64 treaty allies, more than any other nation by a factor of three—are force multipliers. They provide basing rights, intelligence-sharing, overflight permissions, and a deterrent web that no adversary can easily unravel. A purely transactional approach to alliances, in which every deployment is priced and every commitment hedged, degrades that multiplier. Adversaries notice. China’s 2025 defence white paper explicitly identifies “alliance fragmentation” as a window of strategic opportunity. Russia’s 2024 nuclear doctrine revision lowered the threshold for tactical use precisely because Moscow believes NATO’s political cohesion is brittle. The cost of defending the homeland without forward-deployed allies would be astronomically higher than the current defence budget of $886 billion. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a “fortress America” defence posture would require a permanently larger navy and a national missile defence shield costing upwards of $300 billion over a decade—and even then, it would provide less security than the current allied architecture.
The Restoration Argument
Can America restore the global order? Yes—but not by wishful appeals to a bygone liberal consensus. The restoration must begin with an honest accounting of why the old compact broke down. For millions of Americans, globalisation delivered cheap goods but hollowed-out communities. The 2008 financial crisis, born in American mortgage markets, shattered faith in technocratic management. The forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan discredited the project of democracy promotion. And the rise of China, which joined the WTO in 2001 under rules largely written by the U.S., produced a systemic competitor rather than the “responsible stakeholder” that former World Bank president Robert Zoellick once envisioned.
A restoration agenda, then, must be built on three pillars. First, domestic reinvestment as foreign policy. The Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act demonstrated that industrial strategy can be paired with alliance-strengthening measures—the IRA’s electric-vehicle provisions, for instance, explicitly favour North American and allied supply chains. The next administration, whatever its partisan hue, should expand this logic into a broader economic security doctrine that ties trade openness to enforceable labour and environmental standards, giving American workers a visible stake in global integration. The United States cannot ask its citizens to support an open world if it cannot keep its own social contract.
Second, institutional modernisation, not demolition. The WTO’s dispute-settlement mechanism has been paralysed since 2019. The World Health Organization struggled to coordinate during COVID-19. The UN Security Council reflects 1945’s power map, not 2026’s. These bodies need repair, not wrecking balls. The U.S. should champion a package of reforms that give rising powers a greater voice—starting with a permanent seat for the African Union at the G20, already a work in progress—while locking in binding rules on digital trade, artificial intelligence, and climate-linked border adjustments. On 5 June 2026, the Peterson Institute hosted a simulation that found that a “WTO 2.0” scenario, incorporating digital services and carbon pricing, could add $2.1 trillion to global GDP by 2035 compared to a fragmentation baseline. That figure is not a forecast; it’s a menu price for the cost of inaction.
Third, alliance revitalisation through burden-sharing, not burden-shedding. America’s allies are not free-riders. Combined non-U.S. NATO defence spending exceeded $450 billion in 2025, exceeding the alliance’s own 2%-of-GDP target for the first time. In the Indo-Pacific, Japan will double its defence budget by 2027, and Australia is acquiring nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS pact. The U.S. should reinforce these trends with a new allied investment protocol that links security commitments to joint technology development and critical-mineral supply chains. The goal is to make the alliance system so embedded in mutual economic interest that no single election can dismantle it.
The path is narrow but not imaginary. It runs through a coalition of democracies that together account for over 50% of global GDP and 60% of global trade, even before counting like-minded partners. What is missing is not capacity, but the political will to treat order-building as a core national interest rather than a charitable afterthought.
The Case for Letting Go
A credible counterargument exists and deserves a fair hearing. The “restraint” school—articulated by scholars like Barry Posen and Stephen Walt, and influential in parts of both political parties—contends that the liberal international order was always a vehicle for American hegemony dressed in universalist rhetoric. In this view, the U.S. should accept a world of competing great powers, reduce its overseas commitments, and focus on defending the homeland while using trade and diplomacy on strictly transactional terms. The restraint argument draws strength from recent history: NATO enlargement, the Iraq invasion, and the failure to anticipate China’s rise all look like consequences of hubris, not prudence.
Posen’s 2014 book Restraint made the case that the U.S. is geographically insulated, nuclear-armed, and economically large enough to thrive without a globe-spanning security architecture. Events since 2014 have only partially validated that thesis. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine showed that a major land war on the European continent still threatens U.S. interests, including the security of NATO’s eastern flank and global energy markets. China’s coercion of Taiwan and its militarisation of the South China Sea suggest that offshore balancing alone may not suffice to preserve a free and open Indo-Pacific. The restraint argument imagines that the U.S. can withdraw from global order and still enjoy the benefits of a stable world—but the historical record of the 1920s and 1930s offers a stern corrective. The U.S. retreated then, too, and got a depression and a world war.
That said, restraint advocates are right about one crucial thing: the U.S. cannot restore order by sermonising. The project must be grounded in tangible interests, not abstractions. That means making clear-eyed trade-offs—accepting, for instance, that India will remain a reluctant ally rather than a liberal democracy, or that Saudi Arabia’s human-rights record will not prevent cooperation on energy and Iran. A restored order will be messier than the one the U.S. remembers. It will have more power centres and fewer illusions. It will be transactional in parts, liberal in others. But it is categorically better than the alternative: a world in which might makes right and every shock cascades unchecked.
In the end, the global order is not a monument. It is a garden—a line borrowed from a diplomat at that Hiroshima summit who, after the cameras left, told a colleague it “needs weeding, not abandonment.” America has the tools. It has the world’s deepest capital markets, its most advanced laboratories, its most far-reaching alliance network, and a constitutional system that, for all its dysfunctions, still allows for self-correction. What it has lacked is the political imagination to see that order abroad and order at home are not competitors for resources; they are the same project.
On 3 June 2026, the Pew Research Center released a survey finding that 68% of Americans under 30 believe the country “should cooperate more with other nations to solve global problems”—the highest share in two decades. The children of the forever wars are not isolationists. They are looking for a foreign policy that tells the truth about interdependence and then acts on it. The global order was never a gift to others. It was America’s most durable strategic asset. It still can be.
