Trump reelection guarantees the end of the U.S.-led order.

Shalendra D. Sharma, “Trump and the End of an Era? The Liberal International Order in Perspective,” The International Spectator, vol. 55, no. 3, 2020, pp. 82-83, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03932729.2020.1786927.

Whether he realises this or not, Trump, in his own mercurial way, is essentially undoing the very liberal international economic and political system that the United States created from the ashes of World War II (WWII) and has led ever since. With the United States serving as the “benevolent hegemon” or, in John Ikenberry’s (2011) evocative words, the “liberal Leviathan”, the liberal international order provided the framework under which sovereign states agreed to follow a rules-based system of economic and political cooperation and shared multilateral governance (Deudney and Ikenberry 2018). Despite flaws, this postwar order has played an instrumental role in managing geopolitical competition (including winning the Cold War), and promoting global peace and prosperity for the past seven decades.

However, with the election of Donald Trump as the President of the United States, this quintessentially cosmopolitan liberal international order has come under sustained assault. After all, Trump has in no uncertain terms made it clear that

the only antidote to decades of ruinous rule by a small handful of elites is a bold infusion of popular will. On every major issue affecting this country, the people are right and the governing elite are wrong. The elites are wrong on taxes, on the size of government, on trade, on immigration, on foreign policy (Trump 2016).

Not surprisingly, many fear that the liberal international order may not survive if Trump is re-elected (Ikenberry 2017), thereby making the urgency to defeat Trump in November 2020 even greater (Sachs 2018).