Several US presidents have proclaimed a new world order. Today most of us remember only the one that George HW Bush called for at the end of the cold war. “That new world order is struggling to be born — a world quite different to the one we’ve known,” said Bush Senior in 1990. Minus the Soviet Union, it was in fact roughly the same one we had known for the previous half-century. With a few ups and downs, Pax Americana held for about another decade. 

Since the attacks of 9/11, however, the fissures have begun to show. In the past few months, it has become possible to imagine a crack-up. For obvious reasons, not even Donald Trump would dream of boasting about ushering in a new world disorder. Yet Bush’s words may inadvertently have foreshadowed what is happening today. “America has always led by example,” he said. “So, who among us will set the example? Which of our citizens will lead us in this next American century?” He could not possibly have guessed the answer to that. 

History, as they say, is lived forwards but written backwards. Two decades before Bush Senior’s declaration, Dean Acheson, the former US secretary of state, wrote his classic, Present at the Creation. It set out in epochal detail how America had created the postwar system that Bush rebranded the new world order. Bodies that today seem to be in the natural scheme of things — the United Nations, Nato, the International Monetary Fund and the forerunner to the World Trade Organization — were assembled against the odds by the Truman administration in which Acheson served. It was a unique historical flurry of global institution-building that could only have been undertaken by America. No other country had the self-belief — or wherewithal — to remake the world in its own image.