ABSTRACT
In recent years, the old consensus on deep international engagement and commitment to the liberal international order has given way to a contentious debate over the role that the United States should play in the world. This ideational wrangling is a result of system-level changes, especially the rise of China and soon other key powers, policy blunders, as well as domestic polarisation and socio-economic challenges that currently plague American society. The chapter examines the recent evolution of the American ordering vision against this backdrop, zooming in on the Obama, first Trump, and Biden administrations through the four dimensions (distributional, normative, institutional, and temporal) laid out in the framework of the present volume. Currently, beyond surface-level agreement on great-power competition, no shared vision animates the US approach to international order, especially when it comes to cherished values or the preferred institutional make-up. This visionless limbo may ultimately open up space for radical new ideas – some of which could be to the detriment of what is left of the liberal international order.
