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.
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Strip out the noise, and the argument is coherent. The post-war system was built by the United States, largely for its own benefit, to lock in a peace it had made possible and paid for. Eighty years on, despite huge benefits, Washington has decided, not without reason, that the deal has run its course. The institutions it once underwrote now constrain it more than they serve it. Influence has devolved to states that game the system or no longer merit a seat at the appropriate table. The institutions cannot be reformed without concessions it has no intention of making. So America is doing the thing institutionalists consider unthinkable — walking away from the table rather than bargaining at it.
And this is not one man’s grievance. Whether by design or by instinct, with President Donald Trump in office, the line is hard to draw; the trajectory has been bipartisan. The Biden years softened the tone but kept the substance: Washington went on blocking every appointment to the WTO’s appellate court even as 130 members pleaded to restart it, and the U.S. did little to revive a U.N. it had already judged to be failing. The discontent is American, not merely Republican. What changed in January was the willingness to act on it unilaterally and at speed.
For what we see here is no longer an attempt to manage the old order. It is a bid to build a new one, written for the contest Washington actually means to win: the Future, through artificial intelligence, biotechnology, space, and the energy to power all three. That is a larger wager than the headlines suggest. In fact, it is an attempt to compress a generational reordering into a single presidential term.
Which explains why the method looks so much like chaos. The Trump administration isn’t moving sequentially, one file or crisis at a time. It is moving on every front at once, and fast: Trade, treaties, alliances, frozen and active conflicts alike. It is operating on AI time, the compressed, simultaneous tempo of the technology it means to dominate, against institutions and governments still running on the slow, sequential clock of the offline world. Flood every front faster than anyone can respond, and the rational move for a smaller power looking to anchor itself in a volatile world stops being collective resistance and becomes the bilateral deal. Come to Washington, one at a time, and settle. Less a foreign policy than a clearing strategy: replace the crowded multilateral table with private negotiations in which the United States keeps the larger hand.
Here is the catch, and it should sober everyone, including the people running this initiative:
A bet this size needs time, and time is the single resource the system is built to deny. And only the second half of this term remains. Rebuilding a global order is a collective, generational work; it does not survive an electoral cycle, a midterm, or an electorate with no appetite for short-term pain. The Trump administration is racing against its own clock, which may be the truest explanation for the hurry.
And the world it is pushing against has no answer either. Europe wants to matter but can’t afford the ambition, clinging to institutions that flatter its largest states while its competitiveness, cohesion, and hard power drift downward. China is positioning, not proposing, satisfied with projecting stability against American volatility without offering a system that anyone outside Beijing would choose to live under. The middle powers can disrupt but not build. The BRICS of this world produce communiqués but no architecture. The vacuum is real, and not one of the actors queuing to inherit American leadership can fill it.
So we are left somewhere new, not a clean handover, but an interval: aimless, more volatile, throwing off small regional gains with nothing steady to hold them together. The U.N. and the WTO were sclerotic long before January; the withdrawal doesn’t kill them so much as expose how little they were already doing.
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The durable consequence isn’t any single exit. Treaties can be rejoined; a future administration could reverse much of this in an afternoon. What cannot be undone so easily is the lesson now lodged in every foreign ministry on earth: the United States is no longer a reliable anchor.
Which leaves the uncomfortable truth underneath it all. Washington may be right that the old order has now become unbalanced and overdue for replacement. Being right about that is not the same as being able to build what comes next, and right now, neither can anyone else.
Alain Bejjani served as CEO of Majid Al Futtaim from 2015 to 2023, growing it into a $15 billion enterprise across 17 countries. He was named Gulf Business CEO of the Year in 2020 and ranked among Forbes Middle East’s Top 100 CEOs in 2022. His book, Next: Leading Through the New Realities, is out now.
