On February 28, the United States and Israel launched a war on Iran. The US-Israeli attacks came without prior warning or approval by the United Nations and targeted and killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Just two months earlier, the US launched another attack, on Venezuela, in which its special forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from his residence in Caracas and transferred him to New York, where he faces criminal charges in federal court. In between these two violent attacks, US President Donald Trump withdrew from 66 international organisations, including 31 UN entities, and launched the Board of Peace, a new institution he chairs personally that he suggested might replace the UN. These and other developments in recent years demonstrate that the world order the US helped establish in 1945 no longer serves its interests. For eight decades, US treasure, diplomacy and military power sustained this architecture. Whatever one’s criticisms of how that power was exercised, the scale of the commitment was remarkable, and the US did not have to do this. It …