Here's how an "America in retreat" could benefit the world

International Policing Can Provoke Aggression

Although Stephens correctly distinguishes between “subsytemic” and “suprasystemic” disorder (disorder within the system and disorder that threatens the system), his attachment to the America-as-police model leads him to focus overwhelmingly on the risk that accumulating subsystemic disorder will produce suprasystemic disorder—that is, that the broken windows in Syria will lead to regional or global versions of theft, murder, and eventually international chaos. Thus he fails to recognize that attempting to combat suprasystemic disorder by imposing U.S. preferences on other major powers, especially China and Russia, could actually create suprasystemic disorder rather than containing it if such efforts drive Beijing and Moscow to cooperate against U.S. policing. This would not require a long-lasting or wide-ranging China-Russia alliance to be very costly; the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (which arose for different reasons) was quite brief in historical terms but quite damaging in its consequences.

Moreover, suprasystemic disorder is more likely to contribute to subsystemic disorder than the reverse. Imagine Syria’s civil war as a full-blown proxy war between major powers in conflict (the natural result of suprasystemic disorder). Or, for that matter, Ukraine’s. From this perspective, anyone seeking to maintain international order would do better to focus on stable relationships among the world’s major powers than on each individual conflict in a world of over 7 billion people divided into nearly 200 countries and uncountable ethnic and religious groups.