Maintenance of the ILO is key to reduce a host of existential threats---establishes great-power peace

The first argument is easily disposed of. Yes, the postwar world has been thoroughly imperfect, featuring nuclear arms races, genocides, widespread poverty and other scourges. But the world has always been imperfect, and by any meaningful comparison, the last seven decades have been a veritable golden age.

The liberal international economic order has led to an explosion of domestic and global prosperity: According to World Bank data, both U.S. and global per capita income have increased roughly three-fold (in inflation-adjusted terms) since 1960, with U.S. gross domestic product increasing nearly six-fold. The U.S. system of alliances and forward military deployments has contributed critically to the longest period of great-power peace in modern history, and the incidence of war and conquest more broadly have dropped dramatically. The number of democracies in the world has increased from perhaps a dozen during World War II to well over 100 today; respect for basic human rights has also reached impressive levels.

As a bevy of scholarship has shown, the policies that the U.S. has pursued and the international order it has built have contributed enormously and directly to these outcomes. If the liberal international order can’t be considered a smashing success, no international order could be.

The second critique is also overstated. It is true that Washington, like all great powers throughout history, has been willing to bend the rules to get its way. It is hard to reconcile Cold War-era interventions in Guatemala, Chile and other countries with a professed solicitude for human rights and democracy; the Iraq War of 2003 is only one instance in which the U.S. brushed aside the concerns of international organizations such as the U.N. Security Council. Likewise, when the U.S. government determined that the Bretton Woods system of monetary relations no longer suited its interests in the 1970s, it terminated that scheme and insisted on creating a more favorable one.

But again, the proper standard here is not sainthood but reality. And the U.S. has generally enlisted its power in the service of universal values such as democracy and human rights; it has, more often than not, promoted a positive-sum international system in which like-minded nations can be secure and wealthy. This goes back to the very beginning of the liberal order: Washington did not seek to hold its defeated adversaries in subjugation after World War II; it rebuilt Japan and western Germany into thriving, democratic allies that became fierce economic competitors to the U.S.

The U.S. has taken this approach not simply because it wanted to do good in the world — powerful as this motivation is — but because of a hard-headed desire to do good for itself. In an interdependent global environment, American officials have long calculated, the U.S. cannot divorce its own well-being from that of the wider world. And in contrast to how other great powers — Imperial Japan, for instance, or the Soviet Union — ruled their spheres of influence, American behavior has been positively enlightened. It is this relatively benign behavior that has convinced so many countries to tolerate American leadership — and it is the emergence of a darker form of U.S. hegemony under the Trump administration that so profoundly worries them today.

As for the third critique, the premise is right, but the conclusion can easily go too far. It is always dangerous to become so enraptured by past achievements that one loses sight of the need for adaptation in the future. This is particularly true today, because the strength of the liberal order is being tested from within and without, by issues ranging from unequal burden-sharing among American allies to the ambivalence of the American people themselves. There is little evidence to suggest, however, that either American power or the liberal order it supports have eroded so dramatically that Washington’s postwar project cannot be sustained. Quite the contrary — the U.S. is likely to remain the world’s strongest power for decades to come.