We’ve been there for more than 75 years, since the end of World War II.  We are the power that maintains the world order. As such we’ve overseen a remarkable period of growing global (and our own) prosperity.  People from both political parties agree that we are the ones that make things happen.  We’re so comfortable with that role we’ve come to believe it is ours by right and permanent.

Recently though our attitudes toward that role have changed.  We’ve now decided that since we’re in position to run the world, we ought to be able to keep more of the benefits for ourselves.  So instead of maintaining that world order, we’re now in it for everything we can get—confident that the sky is now the limit.

However we have found there’s a hitch.  We attacked a medium-sized country—Iran–to put them in their place, and we didn’t win.  Not only that, an even more minor power—Ukraine—has shown itself more capable of defending our allies than we are. We still have more bombs and aircraft carriers than anyone else, but somehow that doesn’t do the job anymore.  And the problem is getting worse.  We’ve been so preoccupied with China, we haven’t noticed that the problem is not just that.

With nuclear proliferation, computer-controlled drones, and rapidly evolving AI the past pecking order no longer holds.  Instead the future looks considerably more chaotic—with murky and changing notions of international strength and weakness and risks of conflict from both overconfidence and paranoia.  When we tell everybody our new story—that powerful countries should be able to do anything they want to everybody else (because that’s the way it ought to be)—it not always so clear which side of the story is us.  And lowering the threshold to war isn’t necessarily such a great idea either.

Whether we want to admit it or not, we were pretty stupid in the Iran war.  We ignored obvious issues when we attacked, and we were so overconfident that we didn’t do even the most basic job of preparing for the fight.  We didn’t win.  But that’s not the end of it.  Our changed notion of international roles was equally stupid and blind.  We gave up on the idea of international order just when we actually need it, when we can no longer count on always ruling the roost.

Neither problem has a simple solution.  We’re going to come out of the Iran war worse off than when we started.  It’s hard even to guess what we’ll have to give up.  For the world order things are different.  We have proven that a reasonable world order can benefit everyone (at least generally).  We don’t have to be able to shakedown everyone else.  We just have to participate in recreating and inventing conditions for international success.  That must now include addressing climate change, for example, in addition to preventing war.  The job is not simple but the choice itself is: we can either help to create a livable world or suffer in nuclear-armed chaos.