Second, making such a commitment requires confronting the question of whether the American public is willing to sustain such a role. There are many reasons it should be willing to do so; U.S. engagement has been vital to shaping an international order in which America has been relatively secure and enormously prosperous. Yet the public mood is nonetheless ambivalent. Whether a consensus in support of a robust American internationalism can be resolidified remains to be seen. What is clear is that supporters of that tradition will have to go back to first principles if they are to make a compelling case; they must once again articulate the basic logic of policies that American internationalists have long taken for granted. Making that case, in turn, will require a national leadership that is willing to recognize and bet on the resilience and resourcefulness of the American people—that is to say, it will require leaders who recognize the things that have made America great in the past and continue to make it great today.

Third, and most importantly, addressing the current state of affairs will require recognizing the fullness of what the United States is up against. The history of global politics since World War II suggests that both American leadership and the liberal international system have been capable of regenerating themselves when necessary. Indeed, the United States and its geopolitical partners have rebounded from situations that looked far worse—as was the case in the 1970s, for instance—before. But doing so again today will require more than pursuing specific policies aimed at particular problems. It will require forming a broader conception of just how much global politics have changed, and the way in which particular dangers or crises are rooted in this larger structural transformation. Only once the intellectual work of apprehending the basic nature of the international environment is completed can the essential policy work required to constructively tackle its challenges proceed.

Hal Brands is senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) and Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Eric Edelman is counselor at CSBA and the Hertog Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at SAIS.

This essay was published in the July/August 2017 print magazine under the headline “The Upheaval.”