ABSTRACT
In 1991, US president George H.W. Bush said that the end of the Cold War would herald a ‘new world order’ based on international law and institutions. A generation later, in 2017, when Donald Trump’s national-security team gave him a primer on the global liberal order, the president was reportedly so bored that the secretary of state called him a ‘moron’. 1 Trump’s lack of interest in the architecture of the international system symbolises the broader erosion of liberal order, marked by Brexit, Russian aggression in Ukraine and the emergence of populist regimes around the world. Why, after the Cold War ended, did the United States evolve from sentinel to subverter of the system?
