(Reader mode works well if you want to read more than the intro.)

The U.S.-led, rights-based, rules-based international order was the most free, most prosperous, and most safe in human history, with really no second place, and it was enormously beneficial to the U.S.

No matter the status quo's success, there are always people who want to challenge it simply for revolution sake - it has an appeal of power for those who don't have much in the status quo. It amazes me how much people are willing to destroy based only on appeals to those instincts.

And the status quo was very imperfect, beyond a doubt. Any serious critique, reform, or revolution needs to offer a better solution. The aim of the current revolution is to return to the way it was before, which was manifestly awful - really it's to seize power, over a burning world.

From TFA:

> when isolationists imagined a world without U.S. hegemony, they envisioned a world order characterized by mutual restraint without considering who might enforce this situation. As we are now seeing, the alternative to some kind of enforcement of a consistent world order is not an acephalic, mutually respectful world, but recurrent, destructive wars.

> Within this more bellicose world, every single power bordering an important shipping channel is likely to remember it has a potential throat hold on the world economy, and eventually they will act accordingly.

I don't agree with the characterization of current 'isolationists', who IMHO really want to seize power from the former order, and - using a basic revolutionary tactic - seek to destroy the old order, create chaos, then seize power themselves (including by offering an authoritarian or totalitarian solution to chaos).

> Trump’s grotesque actions do not represent the abdication of empire, as some Trump supporters from the far left and right hope, but its degeneration.

and

> A world order enforced by the United States was morally unpalatable for many people on the American left. But when isolationists imagined a world without U.S. hegemony ...

Here's someone else trying to draw a bizarre equivelency between the current (far) right, which runs the US goverment and many others, and are the most popular parties in major European countries, and leads world affairs, and the (far) left, which is politically pathetic, demoralized, has capitulated ('woke 1 was crazy!'), and runs no government, holds no significant national or international power anywhere, and is no threat to.

Comparing them is a lie, an untruth, obviously absurd. What is the author's purpose? Try to look even-handed? Cower from criticism from the right and preemtively self-censor? The latter shows who indeed has the power.