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the management of the system. Even if the global system transitions away from America
Inc. to a publicly owned and operated company, the United States will inevitably be a major
shareholder, even in an era of slowly declining unipolarity.
The movement away from the American-led order will raise a number of dilemmas and
tensions inherent in the liberal project. There is pressure for the reallocation of authority and
leadership, but how will a post-hegemonic system provide public goods relating to open mar-
kets and the stability of rules and institutions? There is pressure for more extensive forms of
international cooperation—and global institutional capacity—to deal with economic and se-
curity interdependence, but how can this be reconciled with democratic accountability? There
is pressure for new rights and capacities for the international community to intervene in the
domestic affairs of troubled states, but how does liberal order develop governance mechan-
isms to generate the necessary collective action and also safeguard itself against liberal im-
perialism? These dilemmas will run through the struggles over reform of liberal international
order, even as rising states and new global issues shape and constrain what comes next. What
does seem certain is that the demand for more and increasingly sophisticated forms of co-
operation will not abate in the decades ahead. Indeed, countries large and small will face a
crush of new demands for more extensive cooperation. In other words, if the current organiz-
ational logic of liberal international order is in crisis, the solution to this crisis is more—not
less—liberal international order.
We can look more closely at the forces for change and continuity in the current interna-
tional system, the rise of China and its relationship to the evolving liberal international or-
der, and the American agenda for liberal order building. In each of these cases, I argue that
the future is actually quite bright for a one-world system organized around open and loosely
rule-based principles and institutions—and in which the United States remains centrally po-
sitioned.
Crisis and Continuity in Liberal International Order
This topic argues that the current hegemonic organization of liberal order is in crisis—but it is
a crisis of success. The problems that beset the current system are ones that, for the most part,
emerged out of the expansion of the American-led postwar system. The postwar liberal or-
der took root inside the bipolar system, but after the Cold War it spread outward and became
the outside system. The American order went global. Markets spread, states rose up, and the
scale and scope of the liberal capitalist world expanded. Taken together with the emergence
and spread of liberal internationalism in the nineteenth century, the world has witnessed a
two-hundred-year liberal ascendancy. The main alternatives to liberal order—both domestic
and international—have more or less disappeared. The great liberal international era is not
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