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American foreign policy has recently become a favorite target-area for attacks upon an alleged moralizing and legalistic habit which ignores or condemns national interest. The criticism runs the whole gamut of our relations with the world outside, focusing with final virulence upon our effort to find peace in the United Nations. It covers most of the nation's history, tracing the decline from "realism" to moralistic fantasy back to the moment when the genius of the Federalists began to be corrupted by Jeffersonian sentimentalism. The vast complex of today's foreign relations furnishes innumerable points of assault. A folly of self-righteousness has led us—so the indictment reads—into tragic error in China, in Korea, in the Near and Middle East, even (though here some of the accusers desert) in Europe. We give quixotically where we should sell; but our purse-strings are tied with moral scruples where we should be lavish. Shrinking from the open use of power, we enter into wasteful and entangling alliances where we should keep a free hand. Crusading in the name of democracy and disregarding the limits of our resources, we undertake to assist peoples anywhere to establish free governments in the face of intervention from Moscow. We take up arms for the utopian aims of an international organization set up in postwar zeal for a new era and maintained at our expense. A course in this literature of calamity leaves us wondering how the nation has survived. It sounds like the dirge for a fallen empire.

Brexit, the Trump candidacy, the growth of rightwing populist movements within Europe: these events and actors are part of an overarching theme of renationalization within politics. The possible consequences of this theme are profound for the current international order.

While China is committed to upholding a United Nations (UN)-centred world order and support the implementation of the UN development agenda for the next 15 years, it has ramped up its island building and facilities construction in the South China Sea to assert its national interest. Greater uncertainty can be expected with China operationalising the facilities it has built and the United States bent on conducting freedom of navigation operations to challenge China's claims.