The global economic order has unraveled.

A fully integrated global trading system seems beyond our reach, but we can rebuild a partial integrated trading system like the one that helped us win the Cold War.

Aaron Friedberg is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In this article, called “The Unraveling Economic Order,” he considers “the breakdown of the international economic order that has existed since the end of the Cold War.”

Friedberg describes the international economic order implemented following the end of the Cold War as one in which a liberal hegemon, the U.S., “tried. . .to build a fully integrated global economic system, in effect extending the perimeter of the partial liberal order that had grown up in the West.” During the Cold War, the U.S. succeeded in building that partial liberal economic system because it was “willing and able to pay the costs involved in managing an open international trading system, even at moments of crisis.”

We’ve been willing to pay the costs of managing open trading systems because our leaders have been confident that such systems serve our economic interests, creating outlets for domestic industries and enabling ready access to the raw materials and other inputs they need in order to grow. That confidence stemmed from America’s dominant position in relation to the West and, with the fall of the Soviet Union, in relation to the rest of the world.

But today, says Friedberg, the preconditions for preserving a liberal economic system no longer exist. The United States is first among equals, but no longer as dominant as before, and no longer as willing to pay the costs of managing an open trade system. China is catching up with the U.S., and the hope that it would follow the rules of a liberal economic system has been dashed.

Since the turn of the century, there has been growing dissatisfaction in America and other advanced industrial countries with the way in which the global economic system is working. This is due partly to pressure from a large, fast-growing competitor, but it also reflects an increasingly widespread recognition that, despite its promises, China has not been playing by the rules of a liberal trading system.

Beijing has persisted in its use of market-distorting trade and industrial policies and its theft or forced extraction of others’ intellectual property. The most recent outpouring of subsidized, underpriced Chinese exports now threatens the viability of industries in advanced and developing countries alike. Washington’s attempts first to coax and then to coerce Beijing into changing its way have failed, and the mechanisms meant to resolve disputes in mutually satisfactory ways have effectively ceased to function.

In Friedberg’s view, this development leaves the U.S. with two options:

The United States can abandon any pretense of belief in the virtues of free trade, draw back behind tariff walls and try to nurture its own economy. Or it can attempt to rebuild a partial open system, made up of states committed to liberal principles, along roughly the same lines as the one that waged and won the Cold War.

So stated, and I think Friedberg has stated the alternatives correctly, the second option is clearly the better one.

But under President Trump, the U.S. seems to be pursuing the first. He seems to be waging a trade war not just with China, but with most of the world. (I say “seems” because we don’t yet know for sure how Trump’s tariff policies will play out.)

If we’re going to have a trade war with China, doesn’t it make sense not to be fighting one with nearly every other nation? For example, isn’t it better to have Australia and Vietnam in our corner than to nickel and dime them on trade? Friedberg thinks so, and I agree.

To state the matter in Friedberg’s terms, we may not be willing and able to pay the costs of the current open international trading system. But we should be willing, and I think we’re able, to leave some dollars on the table to preserve a partial liberal economic order in the face of the threat posed by an illiberal rival. This is true, I believe, quite apart from the possibility (many would say the likelihood) that an aggressive, across-the-board system of high tariffs will do serious damage to our own economy.

Trump might call leaving dollars on the table to keep our allies close being “ripped off.” (I wonder whether he thinks the Marshall Plan was a rip off). I call it seeing the big picture.