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International Affairs 94: 1 (2018) 63–88; doi: 10.1093/ia/iix262 © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has served as leader of the ‘free’ world, providing security guarantees and promoting open economic exchange and individual freedoms in a rules-based system. The election in late 2016 of Donald J. Trump as US president raised justifiable and widespread fear for the survival of the liberal international order (LIO). Not since the 1970s, when academics expressed alarm that US decline would result in a more disorderly international system, has the expert community been so pessimistic about the durability of the postwar order. President Trump promises to ‘make America great again’ by playing hardball with allies, overturning the LIO if necessary. On the international stage, the principle of ‘America first’ is aimed at preventing the United States from incurring losses through cooperation in the form of higher security bills, lower commercial benefits and greater monetary burdens. To ‘make America great again’, the United States must ‘win, win, win’, negotiating more aggressively with other nations, threatening to leave international agreements and alliances if necessary.1 Trump is not alone in his criticism of the LIO. Academics have worried about America’s outsized global commitments since the 1980s.2 Even before the Trump administration began complaining about freeloading allies and unfair traders, proponents of a grand strategy of restraint lamented the costs of ‘liberal hegemony’, also known as ‘deep engagement’.3 US support for the LIO in the form of liberal hegemony and deep engagement has aimed to promote the twin goals of security