A Free World That Works

Editor’s Note: The New Visions for Grand Strategy Project brought scholars from across the political and ideological spectrum to discuss what the future has in store for the United States in the world. The editors of this series sought to foster a lively debate about America’s global role and strategic futures. Each author in this collection speaks for himself or herself alone, and their views do not reflect the official positions of the Henry L. Stimson Center, or of their own employers. Michael Beckley is an associate professor at Tufts University and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

By Emma Ashford, Senior Fellow, New Visions for Grand Strategy Project

The American-led liberal order is breaking down — its core institutions gridlocked, its logic obsolete, and its benefits increasingly captured by adversaries and free-riders. Yet, despite this unraveling, the United States remains an extraordinarily powerful nation. Its geography, demography, economy, and innovation base still provide a structural edge over any rival. What it lacks is not strength, but a coherent strategy and the ability to mobilize its immense resources in service of that strategy.

This essay lays out a new strategic framework for the current era. It rejects both nostalgia for the old liberal order, as well as fatalism about America’s decline. Instead, it argues that the United States should consolidate a tighter and more strategically aligned coalition to contain China and Russia, the two main threats to U.S. security and prosperity. The goal is not to universalize American values or manage global stability as an end in itself but to contain powerful, revisionist regimes and reinforce key partners.

Rather than divide the world into spheres or try to prop up a dysfunctional universal order, the United States should use its military, economic, and technological advantages to build a free world that works for U.S. interests: a resilient geopolitical bloc anchored in North American industrial scale, reinforced by layered and conditional defense partnerships in Europe and the First Island Chain in East Asia, and integrated through reciprocal trade and joint control of critical supply chains and advanced technologies. That effort will require budget cuts as well as investments — ending obsolete commitments, holding allies accountable, and making clear that U.S. protection is earned, not owed.

The result is a strategy that is realist but not isolationist, internationalist but not globalist. It draws on lessons from America’s past — especially the Cold War effort to contain the Soviet Union through selective strength and alliance discipline — while adapting to the unique dynamics of today’s rivalries with China and Russia. America cannot remake the world — but it can contain the most dangerous threats it faces: authoritarian great powers bent on redrawing the map of Eurasia through force.¹

The Liberal Order’s Strategic Deficiencies

The American-led liberal order succeeded in triumphing over its original threats, but now it has outlived its strategic purpose.² Designed to rebuild war-ravaged allies and contain the spread of communism, the system Washington built after World War II was tailored for a world that no longer exists. During the early Cold War years, the Soviet Union controlled nearly half of Eurasia and wielded more military power than all of Western Europe combined. Communist parties won up to 40% of the vote in democratic elections and controlled one-third of global industrial output. Under those conditions, defending a U.S.-led capitalist order was prudent despite its enormous costs.

And that strategy worked. The Western alliance became rich and democratic. The Soviet bloc collapsed. But success created new challenges the old order was never designed to handle.

Many of the allies the United States once protected have since become dependents. Sheltered by American power, countries across Western Europe — as well as Canada and Japan — have cut defense spending, expanded welfare states, and deepened economic ties with adversaries. Some now struggle to patrol their own neighborhoods, let alone contribute meaningfully to global stability. Yet when crises erupt — from Chinese coercion in the South China Sea to Houthi attacks in the Red Sea — U.S. allies still look to Washington to act. What were once anchors of U.S. power have become liabilities — drawing resources away from vital priorities and undermining the very burden-sharing that was supposed to strengthen the system.

Worse, the openness of the liberal order empowered America’s most capable challengers. By integrating Russia and China into global markets and institutions, the United States gave its adversaries access to capital, technology, and strategic breathing room. With U.S. alliances pacifying their historic rivals in Europe and Asia—especially Germany and Japan—Moscow and Beijing turned outward. Russia invaded Georgia and Ukraine. China militarized islands,³ threatened Taiwan, and clashed with India. Both exploited their access to Western systems to grow stronger and more aggressive.

China protects its own markets while flooding others with subsidized exports, spending 10 times the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average on industrial policy. It now dominates strategic manufacturing sectors — from drones to pharmaceuticals — and is weaponizing that dominance to coerce rivals. It censors foreign ideas at home while using the open Internet abroad to steal data, plant malware, and spread propaganda. It joins international institutions not to uphold liberal norms, but to subvert them from within. Openness, once a pillar of American power, has become a Trojan horse.

Meanwhile, the globalist reorientation of the order has made governing increasingly difficult. In the wake of World War II, the United States supported decolonization in many regions and encouraged the integration of newly sovereign states into international markets and institutions. The goal was to stabilize the international system, prevent the return of imperial conquest, and channel national aspirations into peaceful development. And, for a time, the strategy worked: European and Japanese empires dissolved, the number of sovereign states tripled after 1945, and wars of conquest became exceedingly rare.

But over time, this success created fragmentation. Washington modernized the global system and now finds it nearly ungovernable. Institutions that once amplified U.S. influence — such as the United Nations (UN), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) — have become paralyzed by procedural gridlock, ideological fragmentation, or outright anti-American obstructionism. The very openness that fueled globalization and the so-called “rise of the rest” also massively expanded the number of veto-wielding governments. Each new participant brought unique grievances, interests, and agendas — diluting consensus and multiplying veto points. What were once tight clubs aligned with U.S. priorities have become sprawling forums with competing blocs and no clear direction.⁴

At the same time, the order’s demographic and economic successes have generated new pressures. Sustained peace and prosperity have unleashed population booms in parts of the developing world, even as advanced economies have begun to shrink due to the demographic transition. These divergent trajectories have produced waves of migration, fueling political backlash and instability in receiving states—Europe absorbed more than 1 million Syrian refugees, for example, and now far-right parties are ascendant across the continent. Fragile governments in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia struggle to absorb surging youth populations, while declining birth rates in Europe and East Asia drive labor shortages, aging electorates, and rising social stress. The resulting migration crises, terrorist threats, and political fractures have overwhelmed the institutional machinery designed for a more static era.

Many Americans want to wall themselves off from these dysfunctions. What began as a project of purposeful global engagement now looks to many like an open-ended commitment to an unmanageable world.

At home, the order’s consequences have been equally destabilizing. Globalization has boosted growth, but its rewards have been unevenly distributed. Between 2000 and 2020, one-third of U.S. factory jobs disappeared. Industrial output outside semiconductors declined nearly 10%. Most new jobs emerged in the wealthiest zip codes, while large swaths of the country slid into economic and social decay. Disability claims have soared. Drug overdoses have spiked. Prime-age workers have exited the labor force in numbers not seen since the Great Depression.

In sum, what began as a prudent capitalist alliance has morphed into a globalized mess that has hollowed out parts of the U.S. economy, enfeebled allies, empowered adversaries, and paralyzed international institutions. The basic strategic impulse to forge coalitions that work for U.S. interests and contain U.S. adversaries remains prudent. Nonetheless, what’s needed now is not nostalgia, but a fundamental restructuring. The United States needs to recenter its grand strategy around a tighter, more strategically aligned coalition — one that reflects today’s realities. The next section suggests one way that such a system could be structured.

If containment of rapidly militarizing, autocratic great powers remains necessary, but the current liberal order is no longer fit for purpose, the answer is not to withdraw from the world or divide it with adversaries. It is to rebuild a leaner, more selective, and strategically coherent coalition to defend U.S. interests. The goal is not a universalist order, but a consolidated “free world” alliance — one that reflects hard constraints, maximizes U.S. leverage, and imposes costs on tyrannical regimes that want to redraw the map of Eurasia by force.⁵

That project should begin at home. North America already forms the world’s largest free-trade zone, encompassing 500 million people, abundant energy, and a broad industrial base. Canada, Mexico, and the United States together offer a massive market, free trade area, and industrial platform that few rivals can match. Deepening this core — with shared infrastructure, harmonized regulation, secure supply chains, and labor mobility — would give the United States the productive scale to compete globally while reducing dependence on adversaries. A reinvigorated North American economy would not only generate durable growth but would serve as the foundation of a revitalized strategic order.

Abroad, the United States should anchor a layered defense architecture aimed at containing the axis of autocracies: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Frontline democracies — including Poland, South Korea, Taiwan, and Ukraine — should be armed with abundant short-range missile networks, mobile air defenses, loitering drones, and smart mines, enabling them to impose localized costs on any attempted invasion. Behind them, core U.S. allies such as Australia, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom would supply longer-range strike capabilities and mobile ground, air, and naval forces. The United States would act as the ultimate strategic enabler, providing intelligence, logistics, nuclear deterrence, and precision long-range fires delivered by carriers, stealth bombers, and submarines.

This security structure needs to be underpinned by a strategic economic bloc. The United States should offer preferential market access only to countries that meet binding conditions: a commitment to boost defense spending; decouple from China and Russia in critical sectors such as semiconductors, rare earths, and advanced manufacturing; and reciprocally open their markets to U.S. goods and investment. These agreements would include common rules on export controls, investment screening, subsidies, and coproduction of technologies essential for military and economic competitiveness. The objective is not to revive the old liberal order but to build a coalition, through a mix of persuasion and coercion, that is capable of defending itself, resisting external coercion, and wielding collective bargaining power in a more fragmented global economy.

But building this free world also requires ruthless pruning. The United States must stop subsidizing countries that drain its power. Many of the allies protected under the old order — particularly in Western Europe and East Asia — have slashed defense budgets, increased dependence on China or Russia, and neglected even basic regional responsibilities. That era must end. U.S. protection should no longer be a birthright but a privilege — earned through strategic contribution, not historical nostalgia. Nations that fail to meet defense-spending targets, that deny U.S. base access, or that continue to invite adversaries into their infrastructure or markets should face consequences: fewer subsidies, more tariffs, reduced security cooperation, or even withdrawal of guarantees.

Multilateral institutions also need to be triaged. Many of the organizations that once amplified U.S. power — such as the UN, WTO, and World Health Organization — are now paralyzed by gridlock or have been co-opted by autocracies. Rather than endlessly propping up these forums, the United States should pursue strategic selectivity: working through coalitions of the capable, bypassing paralyzed institutions, and weakening those that empower adversaries. The test for any international body should be simple: Does it help to advance American security, prosperity, and leverage? If not, it should be sidelined or repurposed.

The same realist logic should apply to foreign aid, development policy, and democracy promotion. These tools should serve strategic ends, not moral vanity. The United States should not pour resources into weak states unless they sit in vital theaters or offer returns. It should not bankroll countries that hedge against American leadership or refuse to support U.S. positions on key issues. And it should promote democracy primarily where doing so advances U.S. interests — by weakening rivals, stabilizing key partners, or legitimizing U.S. leadership. Strategic restraint — not missionary idealism — should guide the allocation of American effort and resources.

In the economic realm, the United States should be prepared to drive hard bargains, even with close allies. Trade deals must deliver clear returns to the U.S. economy. Market access should be conditional on partners strengthening labor and environmental standards, respecting intellectual property, and decoupling from adversaries. The United States should increasingly use tools such as export controls, investment taxes, and sanctions to extract concessions and enforce discipline — leveraging its control over financial networks, energy supplies, and critical technologies. The aim is not autarky or broad protectionism but fair trade and coercive integration: securing access for U.S. firms while denying strategic benefits to rivals.

This approach carries risks. Some partners might balk. Others might defect. But the United States holds enormous structural advantages. It has the world’s largest consumer market, dominates finance and innovation, and remains one of the least trade-dependent economies. Most nations need access to U.S. markets, capital, and protection far more than the United States needs access to theirs. That asymmetry provides the leverage to set terms — if Washington is willing to use it.

Ultimately, this is not a strategy of disengagement. It is a strategy of reengagement — on better terms. If the liberal order was built on moral idealism and institutional sprawl, the new free world must be forged through selective engagement and disciplined ambition. That means fewer entanglements and tougher terms. A world shaped not by fuzzy appeals to global order, but by the hard realities of coalition-building against great power rivals. The goal is not a rules-based order that pleases everyone. It is a free world that works for the United States and for those willing and able to support it.

The Risks of Spheres

Some contend that the United States could preserve peace by stepping back from Ukraine, Taiwan, or both — even if that means risking the expansion of authoritarian spheres of influence. In this view, China might expand in East Asia, and Russia might solidify control over parts of Ukraine and regain leverage in Eastern Europe, yet the United States could still remain secure in its own hemisphere. Proponents often invoke the Cold War as precedent, arguing that Washington’s acceptance of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe helped prevent direct conflict between nuclear-armed superpowers. ⁶

But the analogy is dangerously inapt. Although the race for Berlin and subsequent crises revealed Soviet revisionist ambitions, the former Soviet Union also had incentives to maintain the status quo, because it was defending borders of victory, vast territories gained in World War II.⁷ With direct control over Eastern Europe and Central Asia as well as satellite regimes across the Warsaw Pact, Moscow had a massive stake in the existing order and was at times willing to strike deals to consolidate its grip on it. The Helsinki Accords, for example, traded Western recognition of Soviet frontiers in exchange for a toothless human rights clause the Kremlin never intended to honor.

Russia and China are animated by the opposite impulse: not to defend borders of victory, but to erase borders of defeat — those imposed after the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s so-called Century of Humiliation. As leaders of shrunken empires, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are not trying to preserve the status quo — they are trying to reverse their nations’ historical defeats. Ukraine and Taiwan aren’t end points on this journey; they’re starting lines.

Putin has declared his aim to rebuild a “Russian World” encompassing Ukraine, Belarus, parts of the Baltics, the Caucasus, and northern Kazakhstan. Xi has explicitly claimed Taiwan, nearly the entire South China Sea, expansive zones of the East China Sea including the Senkaku Islands, and an Indian province — Arunachal Pradesh — roughly the size of Austria. He has also invoked historical ties to Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and promoted narratives questioning their sovereignty, while Chinese military officials and propagandists have floated threats to U.S. territories like Guam and even Hawaii, portraying them as relics of Western imperialism.

Granting China or Russia small parts of these spheres might not satisfy them but rather empower them to expand further. Control of Taiwan would expand China’s ability to project military power into the Western Pacific.⁸ From the island’s eastern ports and airfields, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could deploy submarines, aircraft, and surveillance assets that would threaten U.S. and allied surface forces in the East and South China Seas. Beijing could also install hydrophone arrays and other sensors along Taiwan’s coastline, creating a critical link in its maritime “kill chain” and forcing the United States to either escalate into space-based warfare or retreat from the region altogether. Politically, Taiwan’s fall would eliminate a prominent democratic countermodel to Chinese authoritarianism. And if the conquest were uncontested by the United States, it could undermine the credibility of U.S. alliances — especially with Japan and the Philippines — destroying the deterrent power of those commitments in Beijing’s eyes. That, in turn, could pave the way for further Chinese encroachments — such as on Japanese territory like the Ryukyus or deeper into Philippine territorial waters and exclusive economic zone claims in the South China Sea.

Similarly, if Russia succeeds in consolidating control over large parts of Ukraine — either through battlefield victory or Western abandonment — the long-term consequences may not be confined to Ukrainian territory.⁹ Although Russia’s military is bloodied and bogged down in Ukraine, that weakness might be short-lived if the war ends with Russia in control of significant Ukrainian territory and the rest of Ukraine unprotected by Western security guarantees. Despite heavy losses, Russia’s population size, natural resource endowment, and state-controlled economy give it the ability to rebuild over time — especially if the front stabilizes and military expenditures are prioritized. Moreover, Russian forces have demonstrated a capacity to learn and adapt on the battlefield, incorporating new tactics such as widespread drone use, advanced electronic warfare, and layered defenses.

If Russia dismembers Ukraine, Moscow could consolidate control over key terrain in eastern and southern Ukraine — including the land bridge from Donbas through Zaporizhzhia and Kherson to Crimea, as well as positions along the Dnipro River. This would create a hardened defensive line deep inside Ukrainian territory, shield the Crimean Peninsula from counterattack, and enable the deployment of long-range missile systems, air defenses, and forward-based ground forces perilously close to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO’s) eastern flank. Russian forces stationed in occupied southern Ukraine could threaten Moldova and reinforce Moscow’s influence in Transnistria, while forces positioned in the northeast could project pressure toward Kharkiv and even the northeastern borders of NATO members like Poland or the Baltics.

Such territorial control would also provide staging areas and logistical depth for future offensives, especially if the West reduces support to Ukraine or fractures politically. Historically, Russia has used territorial footholds as springboards for renewed aggression — launching its 2022 invasion from Crimea and the Donbas, just as it used South Ossetia and Abkhazia after the 2008 war with Georgia. A forward Russian posture inside Ukraine would place NATO in a more reactive, vulnerable position, and the threat of renewed conflict — whether overt or through sabotage and gray-zone tactics — would become a persistent feature of Eastern European security.

The idea that China or Russia would peacefully administer static spheres of influence, and not seek greater territorial expansion or encroach on U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere, is highly questionable given the history of the past two centuries, including the history of U.S. expansion across the North American continent. As John Mearsheimer, the leading proponent of offensive realism, argues, great powers rarely stop expanding unless they are blocked by geographic obstacles or enemy forces. The United States expanded across North America through checkbook diplomacy when it could, and through war and genocide when it could not. Germany and Japan had to be crushed in World War II to end their imperial drives. Britain and France were also devastated by that war, yet they clung to their empires until anti-colonial uprisings and mounting costs forced them to let go. The former Soviet Union likewise sought to extend its reach — arming insurgencies from Asia to Africa to Latin America, sending tanks to suppress liberalization movements in Eastern Europe, and deploying nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba. Only massive and sustained Western resistance kept the Kremlin in check.

There is no reason to expect Putin or Xi to behave differently. Wherever their forces have advanced, repression and violence have followed. In Ukraine, Russian troops have bombed maternity wards, tortured civilians, abducted tens of thousands of children, and looted or destroyed countless cultural sites. In Georgia, Chechnya, and Syria, the Kremlin flattened cities and supported brutal regimes. Meanwhile, China has crushed dissent in Hong Kong, imposed martial law in Tibet, built concentration camps in Xinjiang, and militarized the South China Sea with artificial island bases and swarms of maritime militia. These are not promising signs of what larger Russian and Chinese spheres would look like.

Another set of risks stems from potential reactions of third parties. If China and Russia’s neighbors do not knuckle under and accept greater Russian and Chinese threats and influence over their nations, then the outcome of U.S. retrenchment might not be an immaculate transition to peaceful Russian and Chinese spheres of influence, but violent chaos. A fully militarized Germany and Japan; a nuclear breakout by Berlin, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo; and an emboldened North Korea are only the most obvious risks. Less obvious are the knock-on effects: the collapse of Eurasian supply chains and U.S. alliances, which might not survive the shock of seeing the United States create security vacuums for Beijing and Moscow to fill.

The United States might hope to ride out a period of Eurasian turmoil from the safety of the Western Hemisphere. But history offers little comfort. Time and again, America has tried to stay aloof from Eurasian crises — only to be dragged in at far greater cost. In the interwar years, the United States voiced support for peace but failed to prepare for war, relying on paper guarantees such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact.¹⁰ The United States withdrew troops from Europe and demanded debt repayments from allies, who passed the financial burden onto Germany, fueling the Nazis’ rise to power. In Asia, the United States failed to build regional defenses even as it sanctioned Japan, projecting hostility without deterrence and inviting the attack on Pearl Harbor.

After World War II, Washington repeated the pattern. It excluded the Korean peninsula from its declared defense perimeter and withdrew U.S. forces — only to reverse course after North Korea invaded, triggering a Chinese intervention and massive escalation. The shock of the war intensified Cold War fears of communist expansion and entrenched the domino theory: the belief that if one country fell to communism, others would soon follow. That idea, in turn, helped propel the United States into its quagmire in Vietnam. Similarly, in 1990, the United States made little effort to deter Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait but intervened forcefully after the fact, launching the Gulf War. That conflict ushered in a prolonged U.S. military presence in the Middle East, which helped fuel the rise of jihadist groups like al-Qaeda — culminating in the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

These failures stem from the structure of American power itself: Oceans and abundance permit strategic neglect, but American values and democratic political institutions lead to demands for involvement in global entanglements.¹¹ As a result, the United States often oscillates between apathy and overreaction — signaling weakness until aggression erupts, then plunging into costly conflicts to restore order.

Today, abandoning Taiwan or Ukraine risks repeating that cycle. The United States faces authoritarian powers that are not only using force to redraw borders but have openly claimed vast territories in the industrial cores of Europe and Asia. Retrenching in the face of such aggression and declared ambitions might empower Beijing and Moscow to move on other territories they claim, forcing Washington to return later to a posture of containment under far worse conditions. At a minimum, the United States would need to undertake a rapid military buildup to counter the rise of autocratic blocs encroaching on key strategic regions — the industrial and political heart of Europe, as well as the East and South China Seas, which serve as the world’s busiest trade corridors and a vital buffer for U.S. allies like Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea. It would reenter the struggle against expansionist adversaries — but this time with fewer allies, more exposed supply lines, and weakened credibility. Reestablishing deterrence in that environment could demand levels of domestic mobilization that strain the U.S. economy and test the resilience of its democracy.

Even setting aside the security risks, the argument for retrenchment and spheres can be questioned on economic grounds. The United States might weather a fractured world better than most — its continent is rich, its geography secure — but it would be far poorer in absolute terms. Outsized national wealth has never come from inward-looking economies. It comes from presiding over open, maritime commercial orders that enable sustained, compounding growth. In the 17th century, the Dutch commanded less than 0.5% of global population but captured nearly 3% of global gross domestic product (GDP) through expansive trade. In the 19th century, Britain — home to just 2% of the world’s people — dominated shipping and finance, securing 5-6% of global wealth. Today, the United States holds just over 4% of global population yet commands 26% of global GDP. That extraordinary gap is not the product of self-sufficiency — it stems from anchoring a flourishing trade system. If the United States retreats into continentalism while China and Russia expand their economic blocs — Moscow’s Eurasian Economic Union and Beijing’s Dual Circulation strategy provide early indications of what such blocs would entail — it might still remain safer and wealthier than most countries. But it would be markedly poorer than it could be, and potentially more likely to face conflict in the future.

Accommodating expanding Chinese and Russian spheres of influence might seem prudent if the only alternative were a catastrophic hot war. But there is a more promising alternative — one rooted in strategic patience and historical precedent. As during the Cold War, the United States does not need to confront its rivals in a battle to the death. The goal is not to crush U.S. rivals but to contain their ambitions — blocking expansion until the internal contradictions of authoritarian overreach impose limits of their own, potentially leading to a strategic reorientation.

Mounting evidence indicates that the limits of authoritarian expansion are approaching. China’s economy has been shrinking relative to America’s throughout the 2020s in dollar terms — the best measure of a country’s international purchasing power — with no end in sight. The decline reflects deep structural challenges: stagnant productivity, mounting debt, a shrinking and aging workforce, capital flight, soaring youth unemployment, and an overcentralized, brittle political system. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping’s assertive foreign policy has alienated neighbors, triggered military buildups across the Indo-Pacific, and prompted defensive decoupling by the world’s wealthiest democracies. His flagship Belt-and-Road Initiative is faltering, with many of its loans maturing by 2030 and an increasing number of borrowers in or near default. The long-heralded Chinese century is running into hard economic limits and intensifying geopolitical blowback.

Russia, for its part, is bleeding itself dry. Its war against Ukraine has produced more than a million Russian military casualties, depleted key stockpiles, and exposed systemic weaknesses within its armed forces. The regime remains aggressive, but its long-term viability is eroding: It faces a shrinking population, an economy locked in low-tech extractive sectors, growing dependence on China and North Korea, and a political system sustained by repression rather than renewal. Vladimir Putin dreams of imperial restoration, but his war has hastened the decay of the very capabilities — economic, institutional, and human — that enduring great powers require.

Finally, Xi and Putin are both in their seventies; their regimes will not last forever. Yet, ironically, their bleak long-term prospects that make them especially dangerous in the near term. Confronted with narrowing windows of opportunity, both leaders — like many declining autocrats before them — might view military aggression as their best, or only, chance to secure lasting gains before their power fades.¹²

The United States does not need to contain China and Russia indefinitely — only long enough for these destabilizing leaders’ ambitions to run their course. If current trends persist, Xi’s goal of regional dominance will become increasingly unattainable, and his successors may be forced to turn inward, embracing moderation and reform. The same could happen in Russia: A failed war, deepening isolation, and mounting internal decay could ultimately compel Moscow to adopt a more restrained strategic posture.

This is the logic of containment: not immediate triumph, but strategic endurance. If the United States and its liberal democratic allies can weather this dangerous period, they may not only avert catastrophe, but lay the groundwork for their long-term security and prosperity. The task is not to resurrect the global rules-based order of the past, but to forge a more resilient alliance of free societies for the future.

Notes

1
On the distinction between revisionist and status-quo powers, see, for example, Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), esp. ch. 6; Charles L. Glaser, “Realists as Optimists: Cooperation as Self-Help,” International Security 19, no. 3 (Winter 1994/95): 50–90.
2
This section draws from Michael Beckley, “The Age of American Unilateralism: How a Rogue Superpower Will Remake the Global Order,” Foreign Affairs, April 16, 2025, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/age-american-unilateralism.
3
China has built at least seven artificial islands in the South China Sea, including three with 3,000-meter runways capable of supporting H-6 bombers, deep-water ports for naval vessels, and fortified defenses with anti-aircraft guns, close-in weapon systems, and missile launchers.
4
 Kyle M. Lascurettes, Orders of Exclusion: Great Powers and the Strategic Sources of International Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). Lascurettes argues that the United States created two distinct postwar orders: a broad but shallow global system anchored in the UN, and a narrower, more robust liberal order built around the West—centered on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank), and a network of alliances among like-minded states. This selective approach was not a flaw but a feature: it allowed Washington to consolidate influence and exclude potential spoilers. In “Enemies of My Enemy,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2023), I build on this insight to argue that reviving this more exclusive Western order — rather than clinging to the increasingly incoherent post–Cold War global liberal project — is the most viable way to counter authoritarian aggression and sustain a functional rules-based system.
5
Beckley, “Enemies of My Enemy,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2023).
6
Graham Allison, “The New Spheres of Influence: Sharing the Globe with Other Great Powers,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 2 (March/April 2020): 30–40. On the potential appeal of spheres to the Trump administration, see Stacie E. Goddard, “The Rise and Fall of Great-Power Competition: Trump’s New Spheres of Influence,” Foreign Affairs104, no. 3 (May/June 2025): 8–23.
7
I am indebted to Stephen Kotkin for this distinction.
8
See Brendan Rittenhouse Green and Caitlin Talmadge, “Then What? Assessing the Military Implications of Chinese Control of Taiwan,” International Security 47, no. 1 (Summer 2022): 7–45, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00437; Andrew S. Erickson, Gabriel B. Collins, and Matt Pottinger, “The Taiwan Catastrophe: What America—and the World—Would Lose If China Took the Island,” Foreign Affairs, February 16, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/taiwan-catastrophe. For arguments that Taiwan’s strategic importance is overstated, see Jonathan D. Caverley, “So What? Reassessing the Military Implications of Chinese Control of Taiwan,” Texas National Security Review 8, no. 3 (2025): 28–53, https://tnsr.org/2025/volume-8-issue-3/so-what/.
9
Max Bergmann, Michael Kimmage, Jeffrey Mankoff, and Maria Snegovaya, “America’s New Twilight Struggle With Russia: To Prevail, Washington Must Revive Containment,” Foreign Affairs, March 6, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/americas-new-twilight-struggle-russia; Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Michael Kofman, “Putin’s Point of No Return: How an Unchecked Russia Will Challenge the West,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russia/putins-point-no-return; Martin Wolf, “The Ukraine War Will Shape the World,” Financial Times, July 19, 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/b9d7c64f-c979-4857-b5c5-24e0ac8e8ee9; Daniel Fried and Alina Polyakova, “What If America Abandons Ukraine? The Biggest Risk Might Be to the Rest of Europe,” Foreign Affairs, April 25, 2025, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/what-if-america-abandons-ukraine.
10
The Kellog-Briand Pact is a 1928 international agreement on peace in which signatory states promise not to engage in war to resolve “disputes or conflicts…which may arise among them.” The pact was signed by France, Germany, and the United States on August 27, 1928 and by most other states soon after.
11
I elaborate on this “hollow internationalism” in Michael Beckley, “The Strange Triumph of a Broken America,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2025.
12
On the dangers posed by declining powers, see Michael Beckley, “The Peril of Peaking Powers,” International Security 45, no. 4 (Spring 2021): 7–43; Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China (New York: W.W. Norton, 2022); Dale C. Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), which argues that rising powers are most likely to launch preventive wars when they anticipate decline; and Michael Beckley, “Xi, Putin and the Danger of Aging Dictators,” New York Times, February 10, 2023, which contends that autocrats nearing the end of their political and biological lives often pursue reckless gambles in hopes of securing their legacies.