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In 1913, Theodore Roosevelt set out on an expedition to map an uncharted tributary of the Amazon. The journey nearly killed him. Disease, hunger, and exhaustion left the former U.S. president permanently weakened. Roosevelt returned even more convinced of something he had already grasped in office: Geography disciplines power, and nations that neglect their near abroad eventually pay a strategic price. A decade earlier, Roosevelt had translated that insight into policy through what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. His logic was blunt. Instability in the Western Hemisphere would invite outside intervention. If the United States wished to remain secure and influential on the global stage, it could not be a passive observer in its own neighborhood. More than a century later, U.S. Secretary of State…

At the Munich Security Conference in February, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on the United States and its NATO allies to work together in order to “renew the greatest civilization in human history.” Publicly, European leaders declared themselves reassured by Rubio’s appeal to trans-Atlantic cooperation, even as they expressed their continued unease with the state of the relationship in private. Rather than lulling themselves into a false sense of security, Washington’s European allies should act on their concerns. The uncomfortable—and unfortunate—reality is that NATO has become a zombie alliance. Formally, its procedural features remain intact. There is a bustling headquarters in Brussels and an empowered U.S. supreme allied commander, and formidable military capabilities are deployed across the continent. But the alliance’s animating spirit—the U.S. commitment to collective defense…

“The old world is dying,” Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote in 1930, “and the new world struggles to be born.” His Marxist convictions not-with-standing, Gramsci would feel at home in the Trumpian age. The old world, in this case, is the international order that the United States built in the West after World War II and then sought to globalize after its victory in the Cold War. That project brought world-changing peace, prosperity, and freedom. Yet today, the old order has run its course. For years, revisionist states, especially China and Russia, have been chipping away at that order, and now, the United States sometimes seems to be at war with it as well. Ten years hence, the world will look very different. What we don’t yet know is what…