Since returning to office in January, U.S. President Donald Trump has executed the most dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy since the Cold War. He has challenged NATO funding commitments, championed punitive tariffs on traditional U.S. allies, and pursued warmer relations with Moscow—all while pressuring Ukraine to make concessions to Russia, drawing ire in Kyiv and other European capitals.

Trump may not be the “ideal defender of an imperiled American order,” writes Hal Brands in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, but he “intuitively understands something that many liberal internationalists forget: order flows from power and can hardly be preserved without it.” Trump has an opportunity to uphold a balance of power that contains revisionist aggressors such as Russia and China. But if he follows his more destructive instincts, Brands argues, the United States “won’t be an absent superpower but a renegade one—a country that stokes global chaos and helps its enemies break the U.S.-led system.”