How the United States Can Recommit Itself to the Rules of an Open World
The United States should throttle back on great power adventurism and promote a transparent system of multilateral rules that advance mutual security and prosperity.
By experts and staff
- Published
By
- Stewart M. PatrickJames H. Binger Senior Fellow in Global Governance and Director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program
In my weekly column for World Politics Review, I examine how the United States can foster an open world and ask whether an open world requires open societies.
The pursuit of an open world, I wrote last week, animated U.S. postwar planning during President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. The United States sought an international order based on collective security, nondiscriminatory commerce and political self-determination, governed by multilateral institutions. As an objective that promised to balance national sovereignty with common rules of coexistence, it was deeply in U.S. national interests.
That same vision has never been more relevant than it is today, when the defining global struggle pits defenders of openness against forces of closure. Preserving an open world—as scholars Mira Rapp-Hooper and Rebecca Friedman Lissner have recently argued—should be the lodestar of any U.S. foreign policy post-Donald Trump.
Read the full World Politics Review article here.