Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

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Will the Liberal International Order Survive Trump 2.0?

Mon, April 6, 2026
Dinner Program
G. John Ikenberry

For eighty years, the United States has been the leader of a liberal international order, drawing allies and partners from around the world together in a system of trade, political, and security cooperation. Under Trump 2.0, the United States is now taking a wrecking ball to this order. Across the wider world, arms conflict, mercantilism, populist nationalism, and imperial geopolitics is on the rise, while multilateralism and global problem-solving is in decline. Does liberal internationalism—the cooperative building of world politics around openness and rules-based relations—have a future? Surprisingly, argues G. John Ikenberry, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, the answer is yes.

G. John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the School of Public and International Affairs. Ikenberry is also a Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea. In 2018-2019, Ikenberry was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University. In 2013-2014, Ikenberry was the 72nd Eastman Visiting Professor at Balliol College, Oxford, and a Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Ikenberry is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Ikenberry is the author of eight books, most recently, A World Safe for Democracy:  Liberal Internationalism in the Making of Modern World Order (Yale, 2020), and Debating Worlds: Contested Narratives of Global Modernity and World Order (Oxford, 2023). He is also author of After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, 2001), and Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, 2011).

Professor Ikenberry will deliver the 2025-26 Lecture in Diplomacy and International Security in Honor of George F. Kennan.

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Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

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