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While the pandemic facilitated nationalist backlash against global supply chains and international organizations, it has actually revealed we need more globalization, not less. Our problem is overreliance on single-sourcing supplies rather than on a multiplicity of suppliers. Another issue is overreliance on a single international health organization malleable by the country in possession of its presidency rather than a web of many formal and informal groupings whose interests compete to produce Madisonian checks on power and provide a maximum of information as a basis for national and international action. Our vision for a better world should be an international order of greater connectedness and greater accountability. The method and means for attaining such an order should be to use the tools of free societies to protect and advance free societies. What has made the American-dominated order cost-effective enough to be sustained by a reluctant hegemon is that the rules were beneficial enough to cajole voluntary compliance. Rather than construct an international order that maximized its dominance, the United States limited its direct power normatively, legally, and institutionally. It gave other states leadership roles and the ability to influence terms and institutions, which spread the burden of common problems more widely and made US dominance less objectionable than has been the case Chapter Eighteen Building a More Globalized Order Kori Schake Kori Schake is the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. 332 Kori Schake for previous hegemons. Leading with a light hand has served the United States well. Since the end of the Cold War, Republicans especially have clamored for changing the terms to US advantage and withdrawn from treaties and institutions they considered unduly constraining, believing the magnitude of American power alone is sufficient to safeguard the nation’s interests.
The pandemic and associated policy failures in the United States have created an opening for renewed appreciation of international cooperation to create strategic depth and to identify and begin solving problems before they reach American shores. In the globalized order of our American creation, we are not strong enough to protect our interests alone. We should return to the aggravating work of coalition building, compromise, and institutional leadership so that we have the ability to see problems as they are developing and to address them before they affect American lives and grow to costlier dimensions. The only alternatives are leaving us poorer and more vulnerable to others creating an order hostile to our interests.
