For eight decades following the close of World War II, America’s postwar architecture of alliances, institutions, and economic leadership provided leadership. America’s foreign policy served as the scaffolding around which other nations organized their foreign policies. That scaffolding is now visibly straining. As multipolarity accelerates and America’s role in leading the world diminishes, leaders across the Global South face a crossroads. The defining question of the moment: will Washington remain a stabilizing anchor of international order, or become another unpredictable actor in a transactional, zero-sum system?
I confronted this question when I was invited to speak on the future of global order at the 6th International Workshop for Leadership & Stability (IWLS) at the National Defence University in Pakistan, which convened senior government, military and civilian officials and scholars from more than 50 countries. The tone in Islamabad was not anti-American. It was cautious.