The security and dominance established by America in the postwar period is at an end. The world stands at a crossroads. The US must seize this opportunity to relaunch the liberal international project, writes John Ikenberry. 

2020 will long be remembered as a year of crisis and disaster, of pandemic and recession, and of illiberalism and democratic decline. It is also a moment when the basic foundations of global order threatened to give way. 

Not since the 1930s has the world been so bereft of the most rudimentary forms of cooperation.  In all the major areas of the global system – trade, finance, arms control, human rights, humanitarianism, the environment –. there is a complete lack of confidence in cooperative solutions to common problems. 

The postwar system presided over by the United States has been weakening for years. But future historians might mark its historical low-point in April 2020, when, in the gravest public health and economic catastrophe of the postwar era, the G-7 countries could not agree on a simple communique of common cause.