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A correspondence between the authors regarding international relations leads Jervis, Schweller, and Nau to discuss some of the most important foundations of international relations. To the Editors (Robert Jervis writes): Randall Schweller's discussion of John Ikenberry's book After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars is acute, but his criticisms of the role of institutions miss the dynamics that can be involved. Schweller is convincing when he argues that international institutions are too weak to restrain major powers when their leaders decide that their interests call for breaking the rules or disregarding the views of the institution's other members. He does not discuss, however, the more important if more elusive role of institutions: their ability to shape even a powerful state's preferences. Thus while at the point of decision a major power will not be bound by the institution, its capabilities, outlook, and even values may have already been affected by how the institution operated previously. What Schweller downplays is how things can change over time—how institutions can strengthen themselves by altering the environment and the views of policymakers.

The shock of Donald Trump's election caused many observers to ask whether the liberal international order - the system of institutions and norms established after World War II - was coming to an end. The victory of Joe Biden, a committed institutionalist, suggested that the liberal order would endure. Even so, important questions remained: Was Trump an aberration? Is Biden struggling in vain against irreparable changes in international politics? What does the future hold for the international order?The essays in Chaos Reconsidered answer those questions. Leading scholars assess the domestic and global effects of the Trump and Biden presidencies. The historians put the Trump years and Biden's victory in historical context. Regional specialists evaluate U.S. diplomacy in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Others foreground topics such as global right-wing populism, the COVID-19 pandemic, racial inequality, and environmental degradation. International relations theorists reconsider the nature of international politics, pointing to deficiencies in traditional IR methods for explaining world events and Trump's presidency in particular. Together, these experts provide a comprehensive analysis of the state of U.S. alliances and partnerships, the durability of the liberal international order, the standing and reputation of the United States as a global leader, the implications of China's assertiveness and Russia's aggression, and the prospects for the Biden administration and its successors.

The shock of Donald Trump's election caused many observers to ask whether the liberal international order—the system of institutions and norms established after World War II—was coming to an end. The victory of Joe Biden, a committed institutionalist, suggested that the liberal order would endure. Even so, important questions remained: Was Trump an aberration? Is Biden struggling in vain against irreparable changes in international politics? What does the future hold for the international order?The essays in Chaos Reconsidered answer those questions. Leading scholars assess the domestic and global effects of the Trump and Biden presidencies. The historians put the Trump years and Biden's victory in historical context. Regional specialists evaluate U.S. diplomacy in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Others foreground topics such as global right-wing populism, the COVID-19 pandemic, racial inequality, and environmental degradation. International relations theorists reconsider the nature of international politics, pointing to deficiencies in traditional IR methods for explaining world events and Trump's presidency in particular. Together, these experts provide a comprehensive analysis of the state of U.S. alliances and partnerships, the durability of the liberal international order, the standing and reputation of the United States as a global leader, the implications of China's assertiveness and Russia's aggression, and the prospects for the Biden administration and its successors

We introduce the Freedom of Information Archive (FOIArchive) Database, a collection of over 3 million documents about state diplomacy. Substantively, our database focusses on the USA and provides opportunities to analyze previously classified (or publicly unavailable) corpora of internal government documents which include the raw—often full—text of those documents. We also provide within-country diplomatic records for the USA, UK, and Brazil. The full span of the data is 1620–2013, but it is mainly from the twentieth century. Our database allows scholars to view text and associated statistics online and to download and view customized datasets via an application programming interface. We provide extensive metadata about the documents, including the countries and persons they mention, and their topics and classification levels. The metadata includes information we extracted with domain-specific, customized natural language processing tools. To demonstrate the potential of this data, we use it to design and validate a new index for "country importance" in the context of US foreign policy priorities.