Liberal international order

I'm Chris Gilson, managing editor of the Phelan US Center's blog on US politics and policy, USAP.

At the end of the Second World War, the United States played a leading role in establishing what is often termed the Liberal International Order.

From helping to create international organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Criminal Court, America fashioned itself into a global power and embedded itself into the security architecture of regions like Europe, the Asia Pacific and the Middle East.

Yet in the past decade, America has taken steps that appear deliberately designed to unmake the international order, which it began more than 50 years ago.

From intervening unilaterally in the Middle

East in 2003 and earlier this year in Iran, to President Donald Trump's criticism of the UN as a whole institution and its General Assembly, and even threats to NATO allies over US interests in Greenland, it's clear that the US wants to remake the global order.

This has led some commentators to argue that the US is now a revisionist power, seeking to undermine the liberal international order in favour of the ideals of America First.

To understand this shift in America's foreign policy and its consequences, in October 2026, I spoke with Phillips O'Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, to discuss what America's revisionism means to the rest of the world and how permanent its changes are for the global order.

He is a man, one man, an incredible man, but one man facing a system that is so big, that is so old, and is so redundant in its self-protection, that any error, any failure of Judgment is magnified 10,000 times because of the times we live in and the media that exploits every error.

And the good things that are going on, the real things that take time, like restoring the American system, doesn't that sound beautiful, the American system? Doesn't that sound just great? We're in the post-World War II Democrat-Liberal Order system, the New World Order, What sounds better to you, the American system? The American system.

Or the New World Order? The American system, the mystery of faith.

Or the fruits of the scientific method? Which do you like? Well, you don't have to make a choice.