In the history of the liberal world order, the offenses Haass presents amount to utterly trivial deviations and perturbations. A trade pact rejected and a toothless climate agreement passed over. And the whole world order is unraveling? How weak was it to begin with? If the liberal world order is as old as Haass says it is, then it survived the Anglo-American split over Suez, the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the calamities of the Vietnam War, the wage and price controls of Richard Nixon, botched coups in the Middle East, and wave after wave of domestic terrorism across the West, the tariffs of Ronald Reagan, the retreat of America from the horn of Africa, and on and on.

What happened to that resiliency? If the liberal world order can be declared dead the moment that centrist parties are forced to parlay with their populist critics, then its commitment to political freedom is an empty pretense and, as a system of world hegemony, it isn’t worth defending. It has become nomenklatura by another name.

Perhaps it is the brittleness and inflexibility of this world order that is the problem.