League of Nations Redux? Multilateralism in the Post-American World

President Donald Trump has launched a revolution in American foreign policy, repudiating U.S. global leadership and adopting a nakedly nationalist, transactional foreign policy. He has removed the United States from critical intergovernmental bodies and treaties, shaken long-standing U.S. alliances, upended the global trading system, abandoned traditional concerns for human rights, and slashed nearly all funding for the United Nations. This decisive shift in the country’s global role is unfamiliar and unsettling. For the first time in eight decades, the world does not have a hegemon committed to leading, underwriting, and defending an open, liberal, rules-based international system.

America’s abdication, plus the emergence of important global and regional powers, raises profound questions about what comes next. What will become of the world order in the wake of American hegemony? What are the prospects for multilateralism in the dawning multipolar moment? Where might leadership come from, for good or ill? What will become of the UN and the broader network of international institutions that emerged after World War II? And how will these changes affect U.S. interests over the long term?

There are no perfect historical analogies to today’s global predicament, but one that may come closest is the interwar period following the U.S. rejection of the Covenant of the League of Nations in 1920. It is not a pretty or promising precedent. Having emerged from the Great War as the world’s most powerful country, the United States declined to accept global leadership in supporting collective security or, in the Great Depression, stabilizing the world economy. These fateful decisions exacerbated global instability, hastening the descent into a second global conflagration.

The U.S. rejection of the League and subsequent interwar detachment were informed by some of the same instincts found at the core of Trump’s foreign policy. They include a defensive approach to national sovereignty, an insistence on total freedom of action, and a narrow definition of national interests. Trump has adopted a pre-Pearl Harbor mindset, even recycling as his foreign policy mantra the very “America First” slogan of interwar isolationists. But there is a significant difference between the two eras. In 1919, the United States was an immature country unwilling to shoulder international responsibilities. In 2025, it is tired nation pining for retirement after eight decades of leadership.

The U.S. rejection of the League of Nations and subsequent interwar detachment were informed by some of the same instincts found at the core of Trump’s foreign policy.

The interwar period highlights the risks of U.S. disengagement from the international system. Like our own era, it was a time of deepening geopolitical rivalry, mounting authoritarianism, surging nationalism, political polarization, rampant protectionism, and destabilizing technological change. Given the catastrophes that resulted a century ago, it is appropriate to ask what lessons might be drawn about prospects for multilateral cooperation in a new era of U.S. abdication, including whether the United Nations and other major global bodies might go the way of the League.

The Trump Revolution and the Crisis of World Order

Since 1945, the United States has been the main architect, underwriter, and custodian of the liberal international order. That era is over. On the eve of the nation’s 250th birthday in 2026, Donald Trump has declared independence from the world America made. While there is no unified Trump Doctrine, the administration has embraced a distinctive worldview that departs from the orientation of his recent predecessors. Its notable elements include a rejection of U.S. leadership or any positive vision of global purpose, much less global responsibility; a hyper-sovereigntist mindset that views multilateral commitments as unacceptable constraints on U.S. constitutional independence and freedom of action; a repudiation of the concept of “the West,” including any sense of solidarity with advanced market democracies and long-standing allies; a deep skepticism of international law, including the UN Charter; an indifference to democracy and human rights, accompanied by an affinity for tyrants; an attraction to great power spheres of influence, including treating the Western Hemisphere as an exclusive U.S. preserve; a coolness to advancing global development and alleviating human deprivation and suffering; a preference for bullying bilateralism over multilateral negotiations; a zero-sum approach to global trade that privileges one-on-one bargaining over universal rules; and a rejection of international cooperation to address transnational threats like climate change, disruptive AI, and pandemic disease.

Well before Trump’s return to the White House, the rules-based order was running on empty, straining to adjust to emerging powers, diverging values, novel challenges, economic inequality, and global perceptions of U.S. hypocrisy and domestic concerns about overstretch. Trump has now driven it into the ditch. The administration has quit critical multilateral treaties and organizations, from the Paris Climate agreement to the World Health Organization, and proposed to slash financial support for the UN and other international organizations by eighty-seven percent, violating its UN Charter obligations in the process. In February 2025, the president issued an executive order mandating a review of all international organizations of which the United States is a member and all treaties to which it is party, directing the U.S. secretary of state to make recommendations for withdrawal from those no longer deemed in U.S. interests.

Well before Trump’s return to the White House, the rules-based order was running on empty. . . . Trump has now driven it into the ditch.

This abdication, alongside an ongoing diffusion of global power, poses a dual challenge for world order. First, what becomes of international cooperation when the hegemon suddenly calls it quits? Second, what are the prospects for multilateralism in an increasingly multipolar world?

These are unfamiliar questions. They are also disorienting for political scientists, who have long posited that an open international order, in the words of Robert Keohane and the late Joseph Nye, depends on the presence of a single state “powerful enough to maintain the essential rules governing interstate relations, and willing to do so.” The antecedents of this so-called “theory of hegemonic stability” lie in the work of the historian Charles Kindleberger, who attributed the length and depth of the Great Depression to the absence of a dominant power willing to stabilize the world economy. As he explained, Great Britain “couldn’t” and America “wouldn’t” play this role in the 1930s. Having learned its lesson, the United States after World War II constructed the major regimes to govern the world economy, providing critical collective goods—not least a freely convertible currency, an open market for trade, and security guarantees to protect the entire system.

For a stable international order to exist, its adherents claim, there must be a preponderant power; it must be committed to a liberal ideology; and others must be prepared to follow its lead. None of these preconditions exists today. The United States remains mighty, but its relative dominance pales in comparison to the late 1940s, when the British scholar Harold Laski could write, “America bestrides the world like a colossus.” Power and agency have spread to other major powers, most obviously China, and a slew of middle powers and regional players. Second and equally important, Trump has repudiated the tenets of liberal internationalism and U.S. responsibility for maintaining world order. His vision of American hegemony is exploitative, not benevolent. Finally, the ranks of U.S. followers—a byproduct of its consensual leadership style—have thinned, thanks to cratering trust in the United States and the credibility of its commitments. Even close U.S. allies are hedging their bets against an unpredictable America. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, laments, “The West as we know it no longer exists.” In January 2021, Joe Biden could reassure the world that America was back after Trump’s first tumultuous years in power. Were any future president to repeat this pledge, it would appropriately be greeted with derision.

The Great Debate

Historical analogies are always perilous and partial. But one worth considering in the current moment is the interwar period, bookended by the U.S. Senate’s 1919 rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, which included the Covenant of the League of Nations, and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, which inaugurated decades of American globalism. Trump himself has leaned heavily into this analogy. Placing America “first” means no longer bearing any burden, much less paying any price, to sustain a “globalist” order antithetical to U.S. interests. The president’s arguments echo, if less eloquently, the criticisms leveled at the League Covenant, confirming the adage that while history may not repeat itself, it often rhymes.

The League debate was one of the most contentious foreign policy disputes in American history. It unfolded, unlike the Trump administration’s closed-door decisions to slash U.S. global commitments, in the full light of day, captivating and consuming the attention of the public. Many issues were at stake. Critics contended, and supporters disputed, that joining the League would bring all manner of evils, endangering the Monroe Doctrine, infringing on U.S. tariff policy, and exposing the United States to waves of immigration, among other charges. But the main accusation was that League membership would violate American sovereignty, by infringing on constitutional self-government and constraining U.S. freedom of action abroad.

All these issues were at play on the evening of March 19, 1919, when Henry Cabot Lodge, the powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and A. Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard University, squared off at Boston’s Symphony Hall, for what leading journalists breathlessly billed as the most monumental U.S. political argument since the Lincoln-Douglas debates. A century later, the transcript reads not as a dispatch from a bygone era but as if ripped from today’s headlines, as Americans are once again divided over whether multilateral cooperation is compatible with national sovereignty, autonomy, and interests.

The main lightning rod was Article 10, which obliged League member states to “respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members.” Adopting an extreme interpretation, Lodge depicted this provision as an automatic U.S. commitment to defend any threatened country, with military force if necessary. This was a “tremendous promise” to make, he objected. Such a commitment would ignore Washington and Jefferson’s wise admonitions to steer clear of “permanent” and “entangling” alliances.”

Lowell offered a spirited rebuttal, noting that the United States would be under no legal obligation to enforce any League decision and, moreover, would enjoy a veto on the League Council (a forerunner to the UN Security Council). The League was thus hardly the “supersovereign body” imagined by its critics. Yes, it would constrain the United States modestly, but international law was designed to encourage mutual restraint. The age of “isolation has passed away,” Lowell declared. “Things have changed since the days of Washington,” and “when the world is moving forward . . . it is a great mistake to walk backwards and look backwards.”

Unpersuaded and unbowed, Lodge waxed patriotic in his final statement, advocating instead a distinctly American internationalism. “I want to keep America as she has been—not isolated, not prevent her from joining other nations for these great purposes—but I wish her to be master of her fate. . . . We must try to keep America as she is . . . in her ideals and principles. . . . Let her go on in her beneficent career . . . as she has always stood, strong and alive, triumphant, free.”

The Boston debate was the opening salvo in a titanic, year-long battle over the League. Although the moderator, Massachusetts’ then-governor Calvin Coolidge, graciously deemed it a tie, the contest persuaded many Americans that the Covenant was fatally flawed. In the ensuing year, the League fight grew increasingly partisan, as an obdurate Wilson refused compromises that might have allayed sovereigntist fears of an untried and untested collective security scheme. In March 1920, the Senate definitively rejected the Covenant. A year later, newly elected president Warren G. Harding reaffirmed this verdict, telling Congress, “In the existing League of Nations, world-governing with its super-powers, this republic will have no part.”

The Empty Chair

When the League Council convened in Paris for its first meeting on January 16, 1920, the French hosts placed an empty chair at the conference table. The gesture was both a poignant tribute to Wilson and an expression of optimism that the United States would eventually take its rightful place in the new institution. It was not to be. America remained apart from the League, preventing it from functioning as a concert, much less inaugurating a new international order.

To be sure, the interwar United States did not retreat into complete isolation. Successive Republican administrations engaged in “dollar diplomacy,” vigorously pursuing U.S. economic and financial interests through private instruments, while studiously avoiding political commitments and security guarantees. The United States also launched periodic diplomatic initiatives outside League auspices to reduce international tensions, advance arms control, and promote peace. It hosted the Washington Naval Conference (1921–22), which established limits for naval tonnage in the Pacific, and co-sponsored with France the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), a multilateral treaty ultimately signed by more than sixty countries, renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. But it remained detached, sovereigntist, and unilateral, disavowing any responsibility for regional order in Europe and Asia. American indifference and self-absorption would have devastating consequences for international security and the world economy.

The League of Nations suffered many debilities. Some were rooted in the concept of collective security itself, which requires states to treat aggression against one as a threat to all, deploy resources to preventing and punishing such aggression, and ultimately to be willing to sacrifice and die for strangers. Other weaknesses were specific to the League, such as the lack of effective peace enforcement measures. “If you say we shall not have any war,” Wilson had argued, “you have got to have the force to make that ‘shall’ bite.” In fact, the League was toothless. The Council’s unanimity rule, which allowed even aggressors to veto enforcement action, condemned it to impotence, especially when a great power menaced a weaker nation’s security. In principle, the Covenant committed member states to respond forcefully to aggression, including by imposing economic sanctions and contributing military forces to the League. Once they realized they might have to wage war to protect peace, however, states diluted these obligations. They insisted on deciding for themselves when the Covenant had been breached, what constituted aggression, and who was to blame. The Covenant’s ambiguities, loopholes, and bureaucratic procedures complicated nimble crisis response.

Another major problem was the League’s lack of universality. The United States was never a member, of course, but others were absent for long periods, resulting in an increasing number of empty chairs. Germany joined in 1926, only to depart in 1933, the same year Japan quit. Italy left in 1937. The Soviet Union joined only in 1934 but was expelled in late 1939. These absences sapped the League’s legitimacy, undermined its effectiveness, and reinforced its image as a tool of the satisfied powers. The League’s association with the Versailles Treaty and other postwar treaties further discredited it in the eyes of revisionist states, who regarded these settlements as punitive.

It was the absence of the United States that dealt the League its most devastating blow.

But it was the absence of the United States that dealt the League its most devastating blow. America’s defection prevented the balance of power—to say nothing of collective security—from operating, and it left the premier status quo powers, France and the United Kingdom, alone to confront dissatisfied ones, particularly Germany, Italy, and Japan, whose revisionist ambitions became increasingly audacious. France tried desperately to give the League teeth, advocating a Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance and the 1924 Geneva Protocol, but Great Britain, worried (ironically) that such bold steps would cause the League to collapse, defeated these efforts.

These frailties were concealed during the 1920s, when the League resolved minor crises involving lesser states like Greece and Bulgaria (1925), and a temporary balance of power in Europe created an illusion of peace. But its lack of effective enforcement measures and the defection of major powers proved crippling in the 1930s. As Japan, Germany, and Italy embarked on militarism and departed the League, the United States failed to shore up the balance of power or reinvigorate collective security. At critical moments, like the Manchuria crisis (1931–33) or the Italian invasion of League member Ethiopia (1935), the United States either stood aside or blocked more effective collective action, emboldening the Axis. The League lingered on in irrelevance, standing aside as Germany and Italy intervened in the Spanish Civil War and as Hitler dismembered Czechoslovakia. In a last, farcical act of collective security, the League expelled the Soviet Union in December 1939, for attacking Finland.

A similar story played out on the economic front. During the 1920s, America’s stubborn insistence on ensuring the repayment of allied war debts soured transatlantic relations. Subsequent U.S. responses to the Great Depression proved disastrous, exacerbating its length and severity. Rather than helping stabilize the world’s trading and monetary system, the United States pursued short-term commercial and monetary interests at the expense of partners. With the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, the Herbert Hoover administration and Congress raised the average duty on imports to almost 60 percent. Other nations responded in kind, imposing their own prohibitive tariffs, doubling down on imperial preferences, and engaging in competitive devaluations, hastening the world economy’s fragmentation into exclusive trading blocs. By 1934, the value of global trade had fallen 66 percent. In June 1933, the United States abandoned the gold standard and, later that year, sabotaged a conference in London called to stabilize exchange rates. Belatedly, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration began negotiating trade liberalization, including the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (1937), but the damage of international beggar-thy-neighbor policies had been done, poisoning the global political climate.

In the mid-1930s, isolationist sentiments surged in the United States, with congressional passage of successive Neutrality Acts. Ignoring Axis aggression, isolationists took refuge in America’s geographic distance from potential enemies. “True, we do live in a foreshortened world in which, compared with Washington’s day, time and space are relatively annihilated,” Senator Arthur Vandenberg acknowledged in early 1939. “But I still thank God for the two insulating oceans.” Roosevelt knew better. “Beyond question, within a few scant years air fleets will cross the ocean as easily as today they cross the closed European seas.” In December 1941, war would indeed come to the United States.

Lessons from the Interwar Period

The League experience holds several enduring lessons.

First and most obviously, isolationism is unrealistic. The United States cannot ignore or insulate itself from geopolitical competition and other transnational dynamics. America’s absence from the League prevented global collective security from functioning and created a vacuum revisionist powers were happy to fill. On December 7, 1926, Coolidge celebrated America’s isolation, telling Congress: “We have no traditional enemies. . . . We have no possessions that are coveted by others; they have none that are coveted by us. Our borders are unfortified. We fear no one; no one fears us.” Fifteen years later to the day, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Isolationism is even more self-defeating today. The United States can recalibrate the energy and resources it devotes to managing world order and renegotiate the terms of its global interdependence, but it cannot hope to enjoy a separate peace, much less counter on its own critical cross-border flows, from virulent pathogens to carbon dioxide molecules. Eventually, the world’s troubles will wash up on its shores. 

Second, collective security requires some baseline great power consensus. International orders do not arise or persist spontaneously. They depend on great powers willing and able to create, defend, and secure buy-in for certain institutional arrangements. During the interwar years, the League Council managed crises involving minor players. But when major power interests clashed, it was incapacitated, forcing those powers to look elsewhere, including outside alliances, to advance their security. The League became a dumping ground for secondary crises, and the quest for global collective security faded. Similar dynamics are at play today, with the UN Security Council unable to hold great power perpetrators, most obviously Russia in the case of Ukraine, accountable for violating UN Charter provisions prohibiting aggressive war, as well as gross human rights violations. As in the Cold War, the real action increasingly occurs outside the UN.

International orders do not arise or persist spontaneously. They depend on great powers willing and able to create, defend, and secure buy-in for certain institutional arrangements.

Third, talk is cheap. During the interwar years, the United States espoused general principles of collective security while avoiding any obligation to enforce them. The Washington Naval Treaties might have advanced regional stability in the Asia-Pacific, but the State Department and Senate blocked any enforcement measures and refused to commit American forces to repel aggression. The United States likewise opposed the creation of any international machinery to implement the Kellogg-Briand Pact, leading critics to dismiss it as an “international kiss”—a lofty expression of fidelity lacking any tangible commitment. It was the same story when Japan invaded Manchuria. Then U.S. secretary of state Henry Stimson solemnly declared that America would not recognize any territory seized by aggression, but this “Stimson Doctrine” was purely hortatory. Today, the credibility of U.S. security guarantees is similarly in doubt, as Trump questions long-standing U.S. defense commitments to frontline NATO states and U.S. allies and partners in Asia, including Japan, and South Korea, and injects even more ambiguity regarding Taiwan.

Fourth, don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good. Blame for the U.S. failure to join the League rests largely with Woodrow Wilson. Two-thirds of U.S. senators would have consented to the Covenant, had the president accepted some of Lodge’s proposed changes, notably regarding Article 10. Wilson’s stubbornness doomed the treaty. Today’s proponents of multilateralism should heed this lesson. Rather than pretending that all is fine at the UN, they must advance a credible reform agenda and be prepared to compromise with UN skeptics to secure a long-term U.S. commitment. Concurrently, internationalists must counter the false and destructive narrative that intergovernmental organizations and treaties necessarily entail a loss of U.S. sovereignty. While multilateral commitments do require some self-restraint on national freedom of action, they are voluntary undertakings that leave U.S. constitutional independence intact. Far from abrogating U.S. sovereignty, they embody and operationalize it, allowing America to achieve otherwise unattainable goals and shape its destiny in an interdependent world.

Fifth, international institutions that resist change sow the seeds of their own demise. Global ordering moments inevitably reflect the interests of satisfied powers—“the poachers turned gamekeepers,” as E.H. Carr called them. The League privileged the victors of World War I, at the expense of the defeated Central Powers, and endorsed Europe’s continued imperial domination. In principle, the Covenant empowered the Council to revise the Paris treaties, were these found prejudicial to peace. In practice, the consensus rule thwarted this provision, reinforcing the League’s division between “righteous” powers defending the existing order and “lawless” ones bent on its overthrow. The League’s Eurocentric composition also undermined its legitimacy. With half of the planet still under colonial rule, European states constituted nearly half of its membership, and Japan was the only non-European country ever to sit on the Council. Today, a century onward, a similar legitimacy crisis bedevils the world’s major multilateral bodies, including the UN Security Council and the executive boards of the Bretton Woods institutions, which continue to underweight emerging powers and the Global South.

The danger today is that the Trump administration, rather than working with trading partners to restore a lost social bargain, will double down on short-sighted economic nationalism and protectionism, at the expense of shared growth and global stability.

Sixth, economic nationalism and political polarization undermine collective security. During the Great Depression, major powers adopted competitive devaluations, tit-for-tat trade protectionism, and imperial preference. These autarkic and discriminatory polices fragmented the world economy, aggravated economic deprivation, empowered authoritarians, polluted an already toxic political climate, and hastened the world’s slide into war. The Roosevelt administration drew lessons from these disasters. One was Cordell Hull’s axiom, “When goods move, soldiers don’t.” The more subtle insight was that the world economy must not be left in invisible hands. The Bretton Woods conference created a multilateral economic order that afforded governments flexibility to pursue full employment and other domestic social purposes. The result was an unprecedented era of broadly shared prosperity that persisted until the last quarter of the twentieth century, when governments embraced neoliberal hyper-globalization. The danger today is that the Trump administration, rather than working with trading partners to restore a lost social bargain, will double down on short-sighted economic nationalism and protectionism, at the expense of shared growth and global stability.

The Remains of the Day

The interwar experience shows how destabilizing it can be when the world’s most powerful nation retreats from leadership at a time of global turbulence. The Trump revolution raises similar dilemmas. Can an open international system survive if the United States adopts a detached or even malevolent posture? Is multilateralism possible under conditions of multipolarity? Will the United Nations go the way of the League?

The good news is that the world of 2025 is not that of 1919, suggesting the possibility of a different outcome. Most obviously, international institutions have exploded in number over the past century. Multilateral governance was in its infancy at the League’s founding. Today, it comprises thousands of intergovernmental organizations, treaties, consultative arrangements, regional and subregional organizations, multistakeholder groupings, international courts and tribunals, global standard-setting bodies, and transnational networks of corporations, NGOs, experts, and subnational authorities. 

This complex superstructure of international cooperation provides a measure of governance in most spheres of global life, from control over weapons of mass destruction to the allocation of orbital slots in outer space, the setting of food safety standards, and mechanisms for pandemic preparedness and response. Many of these frameworks are imperfect. But this latticework of international cooperation is also deeply embedded, including in domestic political systems. It is not easily destroyed, even by a wrecking ball U.S. administration. Like the Dude in The Big Lebowski, multilateralism abides.

This institutional density offers grounds for hope that international cooperation will persist, despite attacks from the Trump administration and U.S. withdrawal from membership in and funding for major multilateral bodies. The UN Summit of the Future in September 2024 revealed an abiding yearning for multilateral cooperation among member states, notwithstanding disagreements on UN reform priorities. There is no indication that this spirit is dissipating, or that the world will stand still just because America opts out. Indeed, the multilateral system has recently racked up notable achievements—including the adoption of a new Pandemic Treaty at the World Health Assembly in May and a new approach to fighting poverty at the fourth UN Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in July. In November, Brazil will host the thirtieth annual UN climate conference (COP30), and South Africa will host the annual G20 leader’s summit. In the Trump era, most countries have embraced what Indonesian diplomats have privately called their country’s U2 Doctrine. They will be moving forward, “with or without you.”

Now for the bad news. If 2025 is not 1919, it is not 1945, either. There is no prospect for the sort of global constitutional moment that occurred in the wake of World War II (or at the Congress of Vienna, for that matter). Historically, major changes to the infrastructure of global cooperation have required three things: a catastrophe that destroys existing institutions and loosens attachment to prevailing orthodoxies; compelling new policy-relevant ideas; and powerful political actors able and willing to advance a world-making agenda. On all three dimensions, the current situation falls well short.

To begin with, the material circumstances for world order building pale in comparison to those of 1945. To be “present at the creation,” Dean Acheson’s generation first had to experience destruction. For all the handwringing about today’s “polycrisis,” and alarm about Trump’s disruption, nothing similar obtains today. We should be grateful for this fact. But without a tabula rasa, it is hard to update inherited architecture to new realities. Likewise, while there is no shortage of ideas for global institutional reform—and calls for a “New Bretton Woods Moment”—the world is divided on the best way forward, and what public goods it should aspire to provide.

Finally, no single country or bloc is prepared to fill the vacuum left by the United States. China has amassed extraordinary power and wealth, expanded its global reach via the Belt and Road Initiative, articulated a Sino-centric vision of a global security, economic, and civilizational order, and increasingly portrayed itself as the defender of “true multilateralism,” but it has few genuine allies, lacks soft power resources, generates regional mistrust, hesitates to provide global public goods, and is preoccupied with regime survival. The European Union, the only other plausible candidate, suffers from demographic challenges, economic stagnation, political divisions, limited coercive capabilities, and institutional rigidities.

Facing a more uncertain global environment and frustrated by sclerotic and often lumbering universal bodies, major and middle powers are increasingly exploiting flexible mini-lateral arrangements that permit likeminded coalitions to coalesce for specific purposes, as well as to expand their maneuvering room amid rising geopolitical competition and mistrust of America. The expanding BRICS bloc, for instance, has doubled its membership to ten countries, with more waiting in the wings. Although some fear BRICS could consolidate into a coherent anti-Western bloc, its growing heterogeneity will surely prevent this. None of its members—aside from China, Russia, and Iran—take an avowedly anti-Western stance or want to replace U.S. with Chinese hegemony. Rather, they value the coalition as one more mini-lateral venue in which they can make common cause with other middle powers.

Rather than under the leadership of a single hegemon, the future of multilateralism will occur under multipolar conditions, and the character of this order will be different than what the world became accustomed to in the era of American primacy. While the so-called “rules-based international order” was justifiably criticized as a self-serving U.S. (and Western) formulation, it possessed a normative depth that will be hard to replicate. The architecture of international cooperation that emerges over the next decade is likely to be normatively thinner, a sort of “minimally viable order” reflecting the political pluralism and value diversity of its constituents, including powers as disparate as China, India, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Nigeria, alongside America’s erstwhile Western allies and, episodically and unpredictably, the United States itself. 

The challenge for the world’s open societies will be to prevent the rise of illiberal multilateralism, in which the world’s authoritarian and quasi-authoritarian powers seek to transform international institutions and law into instruments for brutal political repression and the legitimation for the raw power politics. During Trump’s first administration, the French and German governments launched what they called an “alliance for multilateralism.” While the results were underwhelming, the time is ripe for a broader effort, involving a suite of middle powers spanning both the developed and developing worlds, including Western countries whose bonds with the United States are fraying badly, to translate such a vision into reality. 

In the meantime, other countries will need to adjust to something new: American antipathy toward multilateralism. The United States is not likely to quit from the UN entirely, or to withdraw from other major apex bodies like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. But it is destined to play several disruptive roles, which one might label defector, spoiler, veto player, objector, reactionary reformer, and sovereigntist. The Trump administration has already defected from several multilateral agencies and undertakings. This includes withdrawing from the WHO, failing to turn up at the UN Oceans Conference, and quitting the FfD4 negotiations while they were underway. In other settings, it has played spoiler, sabotaging collective action by withholding funds from activities like UN peacekeeping or agencies like the International Organization for Migration. Where the United States enjoys an explicit or effective veto, as in the UN Security Council and the Bretton Woods institutions (respectively), it has tried to block resolutions and decisions it finds noxious, such as UNSC resolutions condemning Israel. It has even tried to block consensus statements within the G20, under South Africa’s presidency.

Where decision rules do not permit vetoes, as in the UN General Assembly and the UN Economic and Social Council, the Trump administration has donned the mantle of objector. In March, the U.S. mission to the UN announced it would henceforth vote against any reference to the Sustainable Development Goals, on the grounds that these “advance a program of soft global governance that is inconsistent with U.S. sovereignty and adverse to the rights and interests of Americans.” More subversively, the Trump administration has also assumed the role of reactionary reformer in multilateral bodies, making common cause with other conservative governments to wage war on “woke” progressivism, on issues from climate change to human rights (particularly protections for gender equality and LGBTQ rights). Finally, the Trump administration has adopted a staunchly sovereigntist approach in multilateralism, aligning with other governments to reinforce the Westphalian character of intergovernmental bodies and resisting perceived incursions on its domestic jurisdiction, such as external reviews of America’s performance in meeting internationally-negotiated standards.

Multilateralism will persist without U.S. leadership, at least for a time. The question is for how long, and how healthily.

Multilateralism will persist without U.S. leadership, at least for a time. The question is for how long, and how healthily. Without a revival of U.S. political direction and financial support, some multilateral bodies will eventually atrophy; already faltering cooperation on functional issues from climate change to trade, AI, nuclear proliferation, and global health—where the U.S. has traditionally been a leader—could become moribund or wither away. The world that America made will end not with a bang but a whimper, but it will end nonetheless.