Speech acts defending the LIO are key to its long term stability and peace.

Fifth and finally, sustaining America’s post–Cold War strategy entails persuading the American public to recommit to that strategy and the investments it requires. The state of American opinion on that subject is currently ambiguous. Polling data indicates that public support for most key aspects of American internationalism has recovered somewhat from where it was in 2012–13, and is again at or near postwar averages.32 But the 2016 election cycle and its eventual outcome revealed strong support for candidates who advocated rolling back key elements of post–Cold War (and post–World War II) grand strategy, from free trade to U.S. alliances. This atmosphere reflects discontent with the failures and frustrations of U.S. grand strategy in the post–Cold War era, no doubt, yet it also reflects the fact that American strategy seems at risk of becoming a victim of its own success.33 By helping to foster a comparatively stable and congenial environment, American policies have made it more difficult for Americans to remember why significant investments in the global order are needed in the first place. Today, this ambivalence is becoming increasingly problematic, for the simple reason that properly resourcing American strategy requires making politically difficult trade-offs with respect to entitlements and other ballooning domestic costs. It is also becoming problematic, of course, because even if the American public seems to support particular aspects of American grand strategy, the public has shown itself willing to elect a president who appears to care little for the successful postwar and post– Cold War tradition, even if he has, so far, maintained more aspects of that tradition as president than his campaign rhetoric might have led one to expect. In the future—and indeed, looking beyond Trump’s presidency— sustaining American grand strategy will thus require more intensive political efforts. American leaders will need to more effectively make the case for controversial but broadly beneficial policies such as free trade, while also addressing the inevitable socioeconomic dislocations such policies cause.34 They will need to more fully articulate the underlying logic and value of alliances and other commitments whose costs are often more visible—not to say greater—than their benefits. They will need to remind Americans that their country’s leadership has not been a matter of charity; it has helped produce an international order that is exceptional in its stability, liberalism, and benefits for the United States. Not least, they will need to make the case that the costs that the country has borne in support of that order are designed to avoid the necessity of bearing vastly higher costs if the international scene returned to a more tumultuous state. After all, the success of American statecraft is often reflected in the bad things that don’t happen as well as in the good things that do. Making this point is essential to reconsolidating domestic support now and in the future—and to preserving a grand strategy that has delivered pretty good results for a quarter century.