The Institutional Decline Thesis — and the Strongest Case Against It

The prevailing view in serious foreign policy commentary holds that the current trajectory — sanctioning the ICC, striking unilateral energy deals with Russia, resuming contested deportations against UN objection — weakens American credibility and soft power over the long term. Allied trust erodes, international institutions hollow out, and the United States ends up with less leverage in a more chaotic world.

The strongest counterargument, rooted in realist foreign policy thinking associated with scholars like John Mearsheimer and Barry Posen, runs as follows: the postwar international institutional order was always premised on American primacy and American willingness to fund it. As American relative power has declined — with China's economy approaching parity and middle powers proliferating — those institutions have become less effective regardless of US commitment. The ICC has not deterred war crimes in Myanmar, Ethiopia, or the Donbas. WTO dispute resolution was already dysfunctional before the current administration accelerated its deterioration. If institutions do not work, maintaining them may impose costs that exceed their value, and retreating from them is rationalization rather than decline.

The counterargument weakens, however, on the coordination problem. International institutions are costly and imperfect, but they provide a shared syntax for states to manage disputes without escalation. Removing that syntax — even a clunky version of it — forces states back onto bilateral power relationships, which systematically advantage larger, more powerful actors. The United States, as the largest and most powerful state, benefits specifically from rules-based frameworks because it helped write the rules; the alternative is a world where every dispute is resolved by coercive capacity, which is not obviously favorable even for the most powerful state.

Concrete indicators will test which analysis is aging better. Specific ones to watch: European defense spending trajectories over the next six months; whether other governments accelerate ICC withdrawal following Trump's public urging; US diesel prices at the pump three months from now relative to comparable markets; and whether Van Hollen's war powers bill advances in committee or stalls as previous versions have. Those are trackable signals rather than conclusions reached in advance — and the Russia diesel deal could itself become an early data point, supporting the realist case if it demonstrably reduces American fuel costs without significantly funding Russian military operations, and undermining it if the opposite proves true.