The World Order Is on the Ropes. It’s Been a Long Time Coming.

Soon after the Kremlin annexed Crimea in 2014, the former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski gave a speech in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv to warn about the enduring nature of Russia’s imperial ambitions.

Across many decades, first the Soviet Union, then Russia held competitions for a new national anthem. For much of that time, as new lines came and went, they kept essentially the same music. “This country might change the words, the lyrics, the vocabulary,” he said, “but it will never change the tune.”

A central, unresolved question since the Soviet Union collapsed has been whether Russia can reform to support an open democratic society, or whether its imperial mind-set means the West, led by the United States, is doomed to eternal confrontation with an illiberal Kremlin.

The advent of a second Trump administration prompts that question anew, particularly as the president has waded impulsively into the treacherous waters of forging a deal with President Vladimir V. Putin to end the Ukraine war.

For over a century, every global crisis has sparked a debate in the United States between two classical schools of geopolitical thought, pitting idealists, ardent supporters of foreign intervention, against realists, who mistrust lofty crusades.

Idealists maintain that other nations should mirror the American democratic model. Geopolitical stability comes through alliances forged by like-minded nations that champion liberal values including human rights, open markets and the rule of law. Traditional idealists, like former President Bill Clinton, believed that autocratic regimes could be softened through the lure of global trade and participation in international institutions like the now defunct Group of 8.