Shortly after Donald Trump won the South Carolina primary in February 2016, I warned in an article co-written with economist Benn Steil that “a Trump presidency threatens the post-World War II liberal international order that American presidents of both parties have so laboriously built up — an order based on free trade and alliances with other democracies. His policies would not make America ‘great.' Just the opposite. A Trump presidency would represent the death knell of America as a great power.”
Such warnings might have sounded hyperbolic at the time. Who, after all, knew whether Trump would make good on his threats? Even in year one of the Trump era, it would have been possible to dismiss our dire prediction. Trump did not, after all, pull U.S. troops out of allied countries, exit NATO or lift sanctions on Russia. He still hasn't done any of those things, but, hey, he's only been in office a little more than 500 days. Give him time. In just the past few weeks, he has taken a giant step toward destroying the global system that the United States created after 1945.
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