How did the rules-based international order come to be, and is it worth preserving? Liberal internationalists, who want to preserve that order, make claims about how the rules-based order emerged and about the role played by key institutions. Marc Trachtenberg argues that historical evidence does not support these claims. He also suggests that there are viable alternatives to the liberal international order—alternatives based on certain traditional ideas about how foreign policy should be conducted.
Guests: Marc Trachtenberg is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles.
International Security Article: Marc Trachtenberg, “The Rules-Based International Order: A Historical Analysis,” International Security, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Fall 2025), pp. 7–54, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC.a.11.
Originally released on February 2, 2026
Transcript – The Rules-Based International Order
Jeff Friedman: Hello and welcome to the International Security Podcast. We're produced by International Security, a quarterly journal edited at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and published by MIT Press. Each episode of the podcast highlights a piece of research from the journal, drawing out its implications for understanding the theory and practice of international politics.
I'm Jeff Friedman from Dartmouth College. Today's guest is Marc Trachtenberg. Marc is Professor of Political Science Emeritus at UCLA. His recent article is titled “The Rules-Based International Order: A Historical Analysis.” It questions widespread notions that a real liberal, rules-based order has played a crucial role in maintaining global security since World War II, and that analysis raises important questions for us about how much priority the United States and other liberal democracies should place today on preserving that order. Marc, congratulations on the article and welcome to the program.
Marc Trachtenberg: Thanks very much, Jeff.
Jeff Friedman: Okay, you begin your article by describing how debates about the rules-based order are obviously front and center in debates about international security today. The Biden administration, in particular, often explicitly said that defending a rules-based order should be a priority for US foreign policy.
But the idea of a rules-based order is a relatively abstract one. So just to lead us off, can you define the rules-based order as you treat it for the purposes of your article?
Marc Trachtenberg: I think the easiest thing here is just to let the champions of the rules-based order speak for themselves and look at the way that they've defined it. This is from Anthony Blinken, who was Secretary of State during the Biden period. For him, he defined the rules-based order as follows: “The system of laws, agreements, principles, and institutions that the world came together to build after two world wars, to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people.”
I mean, the basic idea is that during the Second World War, the US government set out consciously, deliberately to create a system based on various liberal principles, but also backed by American power. And this policy was fleshed out by the creation of a whole series of remarkable institutions and declarations, the Atlantic Charter, the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Bretton Woods institutions, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The claim is that not only was this policy actually put into effect, and that these goals lay at the heart of American policy from the Second World War to the present, but also that this policy has been a phenomenal success and therefore we should resist all attempts to change it or alter it—it's, you know, basically treat it as sacrosanct. These arguments had a certain historical dimension. One can therefore get a handle on the fundamental claims that the liberal internationalists make by examining those historical claims in the light of historical evidence. And it turned out that they didn't stand up when one did that exercise.
Jeff Friedman: So let's walk through those claims. I mean, the first claim you make in the essay is that you're not convinced that the Truman and Roosevelt administrations actually set out to create this order that's so commonly attributed to them. Say a bit about how you arrived at that conclusion. Why are you not convinced that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations had this rules-based order on their minds as they emerged from World War II?
Marc Trachtenberg: Well I've been in this business for many years, and I’ve had to work on both of those administrations at various points in the course of my career. With regard to Roosevelt, I had studied the Roosevelt policy in 1941 and 1945 fairly closely, I had not come away from that historical work with the sense that, in terms the Atlantic Charter… President Roosevelt was quite explicit about this. The Atlantic Charter was to be understood in propaganda terms. Britain was losing the war. We had to cheer them up. So we issued this document full of all these principles, not to be taken seriously. And so I'd seen stuff like that. I'd seen stuff from 1945 about what Roosevelt’s policy was, and my basic sense was that whereas the champions of the rules-based order claimed that the goal was to create a world in which the liberal democracies held sway—their term, not mine—in reality, the heart of the Roosevelt policy was to reach an understanding with the Soviet Union and to run the world together with the Soviet Union.
He had this whole concept of the four policemen and the big powers would always run the world, and it's very much averse, you know, at all odds with the claim that his goal was to build a world based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all states and, and so on. And I was skeptical enough to say, well, let me look at the evidence. Let me examine, especially, the evidence that these people, the liberal internationalists, cite to support their claims. And it turned out that not just for Roosevelt, but for Truman as well, they were simply not thinking in those terms. Truman, especially in 1945, wanted to reach an understanding with the Soviet Union. Different from Roosevelt—he realized that you couldn't work with these people, but he thought you could strike a deal based on the notion that they would call the shots in the part of Europe they occupy. And we and our friends would control things west of the line of demarcation of Europe. And, you know, it took me a long time to reach those conclusions because they are at odds with what a lot of people say, but when you go through the evidence, it is so clear that that was the Truman policy. It changed in 1946 because of Soviet aggressiveness on the southern border to Turkey and Iran. And we realized that a friendly division of the world was not in the cards, and therefore we had to kind of, you know, bang the drum to mobilize opinion, both in our own country and Western Europe in general, West Germany in particular. And then, you know, the Cold War is off and running and it's in the context of the Cold War that a lot of these institutions, West-only institutions, came into being. It's an attempt to balance the Soviets.
There is nothing brilliant about this is, see, these are very standard, ordinary notions, and so you want to see what the liberal international theorists say that could force you to change your mind. Because believe me, I have been wrong many times in the course of my scholarly career. So let's see what sort of case they make. And, you know, it's like the famous remark that Gertrude Stein made about Oakland. I hope none of your listeners are from Oakland. But she said, when you get there, there's no there there. There's no there there, there's no meat, there's no substance to the argument. No proof to the argument that they consciously, deliberately set out to build an order. They just weren't thinking in those terms.
I’m a historian by training and I kind of took refuge in a political science department, and, you know, given the fact that I had become increasingly disaffected with my own profession. And I felt like these people needed kind of to be paid back for taking me in. And also, intellectually, they were very smart, but they saw the world in a totally different way than I did. So coming to grips with those differences and trying to figure out who's right and why, I found that very productive intellectually. So I kind of came to occupy this peculiar place in the academic world at the cusp between these two professions. And I came into this method of saying, well, this is what these guys say. Let's look at the evidence and see whether those claims hold up. And so it was a fairly simple matter for me to apply this to the case of these liberal internationalist theories. And they were, developed by political scientists who don't go into archives and don't really get into historical issues, and very great depth, and it's [missing word], given the incentives of their profession. And so it was, you know, relatively easy to come up with these conclusions.
Jeff Friedman: Mark, it's interesting to hear you talk about how when you looked at the role these institutions play that you didn't see there was a there there, is how you put it, and I can certainly see your point that it's a messy story early on. So for example, the United States invites the Soviet Union to participate in the Bretton Woods Conference, which is good evidence for your claim that at least in 1944 the Roosevelt administration is trying to find a way to cooperate with the Soviets and not to exclude them from a liberal order. But then again, the end of that conference, the terms of the Bretton Woods Compact are explicitly designed to help states support social welfare systems. And then both the Roosevelt and the Truman administrations place a lot of effort into devising a rules-based system for international trade that they explicitly frame as being necessary for preserving international order, or at least the vitality of the liberal block. So I wonder if you could just say a bit more about whether you think that those examples are misleading or they just don't deserve as much weight as scholars have tended to place on them. Why doesn't that convince you that there's a there there for these institutions?
Marc Trachtenberg: Let’s talk about Bretton Woods. If you're serious about creating an international economic system that will allow states like Britain to develop a welfare state to pursue whatever internal economic policies they want, Keynesian internal economic policies, without having to worry about balance of payments constraints, then you have to find some way of enabling them to finance the balance of payments deficits that they might run. So the test of how seriously those ideas would be taken is what sort of resources are put in the hands of the International Monetary Fund that would allow it to make advances to countries like Britain to pursue their own internal objectives without worrying about balance of payments. The answer there is pathetically low amounts of money were allocated to the International Monetary Fund. So much so that John Maynard Keynes, who wanted the funds to be maybe 10 times as large as the Americans were prepared to allocate, he viewed Bretton Woods as a failure from the word go. He was prepared—he was the British architect of Bretton Woods. He was prepared to just run away from the whole thing.
And to me this was a big surprise. Even the American architect, Harry Dexter White, thought that Bretton Woods had failed by 1947. So let me make a general point there. If you just rely on the rhetoric on what people are saying, say, “Oh yes, we think it's very important to have labor standards and domestic political economy to pursue social welfare goals,” you're going to reach certain conclusions, but to understand these things, you have to go into them in a somewhat deeper level and look at what these people were actually doing. You know, were they prepared to kind of put their money where their mouths were. And if the answer is no, then that necessarily has an impact on how seriously you're going take Bretton Woods. Then there's a whole other problem with these economic arrangements, international monetary wages. The claim was that a regime of what they called stable exchange rates, fixed exchange rates, would promote trade and promote a more open international economy, would enable at least the Western world to become more prosperous by making it easy for them to trade with each other. It turned out it had actually absolutely the opposite effect.
I mean, this is one of the things that I was kind of stunned by. I don't know if the readers will be. Everyone says, “Oh, Bretton Woods lay the heart of this open economic system and provided for international stability and for the great expansion of trade and so on.” Economic openness did not expand during the period when Bretton Woods was in effect, not by very much, anyway, and the expansion that did take place was really due to, well, to other factors. That sort of thing. You know, it's like these are kind of elementary things. One problem is, well, who studies this stuff? You have historians. They don't know the economics. The economists, they're scared of going into archives. Political scientists, they're just interested in what other political scientists are saying. My hope in saying this is to make—some of your listeners are going to be graduate students who are trying to figure out what to do with their lives. There's so much open territory here because these things have not been studied the way they should be. There's just so few of us, so few people like me who do this kind of work. And it's not all that hard to do and it's just a question of, you know, making the effort and, you know, thinking these things through.
Jeff Friedman: Marc, you spent a lot of time in your article also describing why you're skeptical of the value that NATO as an institution played during the Cold War. So I wanted to talk about that next. As you describe in the piece, international relations scholars have often described NATO as a centerpiece of what's described as strategic restraint, the idea that the United States agreed to bind itself to a particular set of institutions and rules. And then in turn other states, in this case, European states, granted legitimacy to US power and hegemony over Europe. And I'd like to just take each side of that trade-off in turn. First, you say you're skeptical that NATO restrained US behavior. Now, obviously, the United States spent a lot of time during the Cold War trying to accommodate the wishes of its allies, but I gather you don't think that indicates that the NATO as an institution afforded strategic restraint.
Could you just help to tease out that distinction for us?
Marc Trachtenberg: Yeah, of course the United States couldn't do whatever it wanted. Why not? Because other countries are important politically. You always have to take political considerations into account. And this was the case, for example, with West Germany, before West Germany entered NATO and before West Germany even became a sovereign state. This is during the period when the occupation statute was still in effect, before West Germany even had an army, right? This is 1950, when Dean Acheson tried to force the Europeans to move ahead very rapidly with the rearmament of West Germany, and he wasn't able to do it, right? Shows that America's not just a hegemon that can do whatever it wants, even though the Europeans are absolutely dependent on the United States, and even though NATO is already in existence. It has nothing to do with NATO. It has to do with the Germans refusing to go along with this. And what are you going to do? It has to do with our fundamental goal is to create a strong European counterweight to Soviet power in Europe, and the particular institutional forum that counterweight creates is a secondary importance, right?
I can give you another example. How do you go about testing whether it's NATO or political considerations? Well, you look for example at these kind of natural experiments, like when France withdrew from NATO in 1966. What sort of difference did that make? If NATO was so important, it should have made an enormous difference. If I'm right about political considerations being the crucial thing, it should have been of relatively minor significance. So you look at the whole story of what happened with France’s relations with NATO after de Gaulle pulled out in 1966. No problem at all. Why no problem? Because de Gaulle had the French chief of staff, General Ély, make an arrangement with the American commander in New York, who was also the NATO commander, General Lemnitzer, in 1967, that basically solved the whole problem of how French forces would be coordinated with NATO that people found very satisfactory and de Gaulle himself said, “This is no problem.” As a matter of fact, this French scholar who worked on this stuff, Frédéric Bozo, his name is, who actually says it helped the Western cause. It strengthened the Western alliance that de Gaulle did what he did, right? So by going into these issues in some depth, you could really get a nice handle on all of these things, right? Institutions, they're created by governments to just make things a little easier. What's really important are the policies that are pursued. In the case of NATO, it's the policy of defending your against the Soviet Union and using American power for that purpose.
One last point, and this has to do with the role of the United States, because when we think of the NATO system, we think of a system based on American power, the Atlantic, the A in NATO, right? What people ignore is that it was American policy for most of the Truman period and for all of the Eisenhower period to withdraw from Europe, to get the Europeans to come together and form a strong bloc that could defend itself against the threat from the east without direct American support. Eisenhower wanted to withdraw American troops from Europe. What happened was that if Europe was to defend itself, it would have to obviously be armed with nuclear weapons, because you can't stand up to a great nuclear power like the USSR with purely conventional forces. That meant in particular that the most important country in the front line, West Germany, would also have to go nuclear. Germans during the Adenauer period very much wanted to do so, although most people are not aware of that fact. And this was what triggered the great Berlin crisis in November of 1958, the German nuclear issue. Kennedy comes along in 1961 and realizes that if you want peace, you're going to have to deal with these issues. You have to strike a deal with the USSR. Once again, the notion is that security is not something that you provide purely on a unilateral basis, but security is a product of the set of understandings you reach with your main adversary. And they eventually do reach a deal with the Soviets, it's tacit, but basically Germany will be kept non-nuclear, but the other side of that coin is that American forces have to stay in Europe on a more or less permanent basis.
So that's how the system based on American power came into being. It came into being for political reasons. It was as a result of a political process unfolding over an 18-year period, and not as a result of a decision that was made during World War II. President Roosevelt wanted to withdraw the American troops from Europe within a couple of years after the war. I mean, all this stuff is very well known. All these notions that the NATO system as we came to know it, the design for it was sketched out during the war and the immediate post-war period, it just can't stand up in the light of the evidence.
So anyway, I think what goes on is that since institutions are so visible, people tend to attribute to them more importance than they deserve—you know, tip of the iceberg. But what you’ve got to focus on are the—it's the 90% of the iceberg that lies below the surface, and that's why looking at all this evidence that was not open at the time, but it's only been released 30 years later, it is the key to understanding all these things. Frankly, if I want your listeners to take away one point from this conversation, it's that there’s a method for getting at these issues. It's this historical method. It means going to the sources in a fairly deep way, putting aside a lot of what you've observed from the general culture and trying to approach this material with an open mind and reach conclusions on the basis of the evidence. Anyway, that's my basic insight into all of these issues that I’ve acquired over the years.
Jeff Friedman: Mark, you're also skeptical in your article that Europeans bought into the idea of liberal, of U.S. hegemony, and that of course is crucial to this bargain that's often described as strategic restraints--so the United States binds itself to institutions. You're skeptical it did that. The conventional wisdom is that other states, in this case, Europe, accepted the legitimacy of US power. You're also skeptical of that. You've already mentioned French President Charles de Gaulle, who famously pushed back against US leadership in Europe. But I wonder how well the story extends outside of that. Germany, for example, at least in public, was much less critical of what John Ikenberry would call liberal hegemony on the part of the United States. Did they also not accept the legitimacy of that position to the same extent that the French did? How well does the argument on that point generalize outside the French context?
Marc Trachtenberg: Yeah, the key point is this point about legitimacy. Of course, the Europeans had to take power realities into account. Of course, they were threatened from the east. Of course, they knew how important it was that the United States have a military relationship with them. And the more exposed they were to Soviet power, the more salient those considerations were. Why was it, during the Vietnam War period, that de Gaulle could openly oppose the United States, while the German government, which was also very skeptical of US policy in Vietnam, took a much more, shall we say, prudent line, even though these are Social Democrats who very much disliked that policy? Why was that? Well, if the Soviets were ever to invade Europe, they would have to pass through German territory. As long as Germany had a relationship with the United States, that would serve as a trip wire, bringing the Americans into play against the Soviets, and France would be protected. So geopolitically, France has a free hand.
Fast-forward to 2003 and the Iraq War. Lo and behold, you find both the Germans and the French deeply oppose the US policy in Iraq. Why? Because the geopolitical position has changed dramatically. Now Poland is in NATO. Poland is on the front line. Poland supports the United States in Iraq, not surprisingly, right? If the Soviets move, by that point the Russians, were ever to move West, they would have to cross Poland. Poland is in NATO; that would trigger American involvement. Germany is now free to behave as France did during the Vietnam War and join France and oppose the United States. It's all geopolitics.
Jeff Friedman: You rightly devote a lot of attention in the article to this idea of strategic restraint. It plays such an important role in international relations theory. But I can imagine, I mean, there are any number of other ways in which institutions can be valuable. One of them is just helping states to coordinate complicated policies.
And of course, during the Cold War, the United States and Europe were working on a lot of complicated policies, placing the Euromissiles, managing détente, setting up nuclear doctrine. And I could just imagine that all of that would be a lot easier if it takes place within an institutional context.
And from the United States’ standpoint, it might be quite useful that within that institution, Washington has a position of leadership. So I wonder what you make of that argument? Is it you think that argument is wrong, that institutions can help coordinate complex policies, or just that it's a relatively minor factor in helping states to accommodate power realities.
Marc Trachtenberg: To me it's like if there's a labor negotiation and the representatives of the trade unions are meeting with the representatives of some business firms, and people say, you know, what's really important is the room in which these guys are meeting, you know, it's very important that this room have comfortable chairs and that they have computers and coffee machines and so on. And if you look at NATO, did it really serve a fundamental role? No, policies are made at the national level. We may take, the United States may take the views of the allies into account because they carry certain political weight and it’s in their interest to work things out with them. Again, it's political considerations that are dominant.
We change our policy from the defense of Europe, away from what's believed to be massive retaliation. There's a significant shift that takes place during the Kennedy period unilaterally within the American government. And we do this without first getting the Europeans to go through the whole process of approving a new strategic concept. The strategic concept that reflects these notions is adopted only at the end of the decade (MC 14/3).
On the whole issue of the Euromissiles, NATO as an institution does not play a major role. These are basically issues that are decided on within the national governments, negotiated among the national governments. But there's a NATO overlay and a lot of documents are in, a lot of talk, communiques issued, all this kind of stuff. Is that to be ignored entirely? No. I wouldn't even use the word trivial. It has a certain importance because it helps convince people that we're all in this together, that there is a Western community, meaning that, you know, if the enemy ever were to move, then we would react strongly. And that sort of thing is important. It's important because a lot of people are taking it in at home, you know, who believe these NATO structures are very important, and that in itself, whether right or wrong, gives them a certain importance. But I mean, I know this stuff sounds like I'm being very cynical, but it's like, you think it through and you say, well, is a country like the United States really prepared to allow these fundamental issues of life and death to be dealt with by a bunch of officials in some building in Brussels? You know, obviously not. And there's nothing wrong with that. You know, let’s just accept realities for what they are.
Jeff Friedman: Yeah, I think one of the things that's interesting about the piece is you're not just criticizing the conventional wisdom, but offering an alternative, and in this case, an alternative explanation for what stabilized the Cold War, which as you've been describing throughout this conversation, in your view, had more to do with power realities. And you've been explicating those your whole career, particularly in your book A Constructed Peace, which is a landmark work.
Obviously though that's an argument about—a historical argument about what happened during the Cold War, and I'd like to take that up to today. Why does it matter so much to know why, what helped to stabilize the Cold War in Europe for 40 years? What does that suggest about the value the rules-based order plays today in a largely different context?
Marc Trachtenberg: Yeah, I mean, you're right. Most of this paper is just a critique of other people's arguments. But I felt it to kind of be a little irresponsible to just leave it at that and just be purely negative. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about what this story tells us about what the alternatives are.
Well, just kind of begin with the economic side. The whole Bretton Woods system, as you know, collapsed in 1971. And we can understand why it collapsed, because the design was fundamentally flawed because it didn't provide an effective mechanism for dealing with payments and balances. No adjustment mechanism. And the post–Bretton Woods system, the system where we allowed markets to set exchange rates, floating exchange rates, it was called. That's worked a lot better if the goal is increased economic openness. So, that story in itself shows you that the view associated with classical economics from Adam Smith through Hayek and in political science with Kenneth Waltz, that there can be order without an order, the system has its own internal dynamic, which can be self-stabilizing if people act the right way.
And I'm historian and, but for a bunch of peculiar reasons I ended up interacting with political scientists a lot. One of the things you do is you have to grapple at a conscious level with this whole question of, you know, what makes for a stable international order? How do you get at it as a historian? Well, you go back and you look at all these different historical episodes, origins of the First World War, failure of the peace of 1919, origins of the Second World War, the Cold War. And you say to yourself, what do those stories tell us about these fundamental issues of how international politics works? What makes for a stable international order? What makes for war? What sort of foreign policy should you adopt, if the goal is peace, if the goal is a stable international order, rather than extending democracy or human rights, or whatever. And the answer is this traditional realist concept, the concept that states should pull in their horns and relate to other states on the basis of their core political interests, our core political interests. We shouldn’t pursue an ideologically motivated foreign policy, a policy that pushes us toward intervention in their internal affairs, but rather just seeks to get along with them, because you always profit in power-political terms from having friends rather than enemies. Adversarial relations are a burden that you want to avoid, and this was understood by traditional thinkers. Doesn't mean you're an isolationist, doesn't mean you think you should never intervene, but it does give you certain criteria for intervention, which allow you to get along with other powers that think the same way.
So I think that the whole story of the Cold War, that if we had peace during the Cold War, it was not because the liberal internationalists’ philosophy lay at the heart of American policy during that period. Quite the contrary, althoughthey did not, for various reasons, make a point of emphasizing this, and the rhetoric emphasized the more liberal aspects of policy. In reality, US policy was based on realist considerations, on this whole notion that we want to get along with the Soviets, let's try and work out some sort of arrangement for doing so. So the basic argument of that book that you mentioned is that that's why a stable international system came into being in 1963, more or less stable. Right? If you look at American policy throughout that period, you see the sorts of considerations that are driving it are not these liberal policies. It's only by ignoring all the historical evidence that you can make these kinds of arguments.
So I felt like, well, it was important to kind of give people something because I do believe in my heart of hearts that, if we are going to deal effectively with these great problems of international politics—and nuclear weapons have not gone away, although people seem to kind of think they have—if we're to with these very important problems, we have to figure out how to deal with it, and we can't rely in the final analysis on what are essentially just myths about the past.
Jeff Friedman: I mean, it's interesting to hear you talk about that, and I think, I mean, certainly in principle I can see how major powers of the world should be able to reach a form of coexistence on the basis of power realities, exactly as you say. And then I wonder if in practice it's just a lot easier to go about this if there are clear rules of the road. Like for example, you're certainly right that a system of free exchange and the Smithian invisible hand could make trade or international finance stable. But I suppose your critics would just point to the last year and the Trump administration's tariff policies to indicate that once you start breaking the rules of the road, you get a lot of chaos.
And I suspect that people would also make similar arguments about security. So, for example, you know, a lot of smart people worry about the chances that Russia might try to claim control of a Russian speaking part of Estonia called Narva, and under the rules of the road for NATO, that's not okay. That's a red line. You attack any piece of any ally, no matter how small it is, and that triggers Article 5. And the more that you have an institution that sets those rules and imbues them with values and raises their salience, the more likely it is, perhaps, that those lines will be accepted.
And so I just kind of wonder how, in both of these domains, once you start repealing these rules and you give it a free for all, might that not lend itself to a sort of ad hoc, salami-slicing place where sort of nobody knows the rules that they're playing by, and leads to a potential source of instability. And again, I think a lot of people might point to the last 10 months of trade policy as a good example of that. So again, in practice, are we not worried that without rules of the road, things could go off the rails and, and potentially lead to important forms of instability?
Marc Trachtenberg: I personally feel like the alternative approach, the realist approach, has certain rules of the road. You should not interfere in the internal affairs of adversary powers. It's, you know, et cetera, et cetera. We have this rule of the world: the sovereign equality of all states. Well, according to that rule, the Soviet Union had every right to deploy missiles in Cuba in 1962. The Cubans were a sovereign state. They had every right to ask other countries to defend them. The United States had no right to do what it did. Do you believe that, do you believe that countries don't have the right to defend their core interests? Well, one of the rules could be yes, countries do have the right to behave in accordance with power-political concerns. It's a different way of looking at things.
On the whole issue of… We shower these commitments and defense relationships on all these other countries. And there's a moral hazard problem there. And if they feel like they can rely on the United States to defend them, no matter what, who knows what sorts of policies they were pursuing? Do you want to give them a blank check? The whole—incidentally, you mentioned Article 5 of the NATO treaty: That does not oblige the United States to use military force in those events. All you have to do is go back and read the ratification hearings for the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949 to see that that was the case.
On the whole business of the Trump tariffs and his trade policies, we don't even know how this thing is going to sort itself out. I mean, has it really disrupted people's everyday lives? How do you feel about globalization in general? My personal feeling is that globalization has had a big downside and that, it has not been all that good for the United States in domestic terms, in terms of, you know—the people profited from it, the top tenth of the pecking order, they've done extremely well, and ordinary people have just been treading water, and that has not been healthy for the country.
And, you know, maybe it's time to shake things up a little bit.
Jeff Friedman: Mark, it's been great speaking with you today. Thank you. Congratulations on the article and, and thanks to everybody for listening to the International Security Podcast, produced by International Security, a quarterly journal at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, published by MIT Press.
If you like the conversation, take a moment to rate and review us or share on social media. That helps other people find the show. I'm Jeff Friedman. The Executive Editor of International Security is Jacqueline L. Hazelton. Our producer is Monica Achen. We thank Doug Scott at Tectonic Video for technical assistance. Our guest has been Mark Trachtenberg. See you next time.