President Donald Trump’s second term is sparking widespread concern about the future of the Liberal International Order (LIO). He has again rescinded support for numerous international institutions the US helped create, challenging these institutions and the underpinning order. Trump has, for instance, questioned the US commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and to the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) free trade principles. Trump has also seized budgetary contributions to the UN, its funds, and programmes, and terminated US membership in international institutions, including the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. What explains the withdrawal of the US from institutions it helped to create? What are the effects of US disengagement on these institutions? How can the defenders of the LIO respond? 

After Exit provides a first, book-length, and longitudinal study of US disengagement from international institutions and its consequences. Leveraging a novel dataset of the withdrawal of US support from international agreements and organisations (IOs) since World War II, as well as numerous interviews with government and IO officials, the book makes three contributions:

1. US withdrawal is not a Trump-specific phenomenon. After Exit demonstrates that the US has frequently disengaged from IOs and agreements since 1945, not only in the last few decades or under Trump, as recent studies sparked by Trump’s America First policy suggest. The book argues that US power preponderance allowed for the promotion of institutions in the past, but also to turn away once institutions became dissatisfying and evaded its control.

2. Institutions are not doomed to fail without US support. After Exit shows that most of the institutions the US has abandoned since 1945 have survived without its support. While some show signs of decline, a third remained fully resilient. This poses a puzzle for both pessimists in the tradition of realist Hegemonic Stability Theory, who expect institutions to fail without hegemonic support, and liberal-institutionalist optimists, who postulate institutional resilience.

3. The fate of institutions rests with alternative leaders. After Exit explains why some institutions are resilient while others decline or even fail by developing the Leadership Transition Theory and testing it in a multi-method approach. The book argues that, in the absence of US leadership, other Western powers and IO bureaucracies are often willing to fill the void. The book posits that attempts by non-hegemonic leaders to adapt institutions to the challenges of US withdrawal succeed when they can leverage soft power to enlist states with sufficient hard power to sustain cooperation.

After Exit thereby adds to scholarship on power, international institutions, and order – a long-standing theme in International Relations and International Political Economy – as well as recent studies on the contestation, exit, and survival of international institutions in times of populist backlash and great power rivalries more generally. 

After Exit will be of interest to academic audiences across disciplines that want to better understand the long-standing, ambivalent relationship between the US and multilateralism, as well as to a broader public and decision-makers grappling with the order’s crisis and ways to defend it.