When Washington announced in January that the United States would withdraw from 66 international organizations — 31 of them United Nations bodies, including the framework convention that has anchored global climate diplomacy for three decades, the reaction abroad was the familiar blend of alarm and condescension. Reckless. Isolationist. The indispensable nation calling it quits.

I write from outside the American argument, not within it, making sense of Washington from a global vantage rather than a domestic one. From here, a less comforting reading emerges. What looks like a tantrum is closer to a thesis, and that thesis deserves to be taken seriously, because dismissing it is how (and why) the proponents of the current order keep on failing to grasp why the global order is being dismantled.