Although the American military record since 1945 has been pretty unimpressive, some argue, first, that the United States, aided perhaps by the attention-arresting fear of nuclear weapons, was necessary to provide worldwide security and thus to order the world, and, second, that the United States was vital in constructing international institutions, conventions, and norms, advancing economic development, and expanding democracy–processes, it is contended, that in various ways have ordered the world and crucially helped to establish and maintain international peace. However, it seems more plausible that the positive developments would mostly have happened even without much American security participation, and that, for the most part, world order has developed not from the machinations of the reigning superpower but from the aversion to international war embraced after World War II especially by developed countries. In fact, if the nearly 200 states that inhabit the world order come substantially to abandon the idea that international war is a sensible method for solving problems among themselves, the notion that they live in “anarchy” becomes misleading and could encourage undesirable policy developments. “World order” is based on a general aversion to international war and does not depend on the United States.

It really seems time to take into account the consequences of the fact that countries, particularly leading or developed ones, reversing the course of several millennia, no longer envision international war as a sensible method for resolving their disputes. Indeed, the aversion to international war or the rise of something of a culture or society of international peace that has substantially enveloped the world should be seen as a causative or facilitating independent variable. International war seems to be in pronounced decline because of the way attitudes toward it have changed, roughly following the pattern by which the institution of formal slavery became discredited and then obsolete. Under the circumstances, there is potential virtue in the traditionally maligned diplomatic techniques of complacency and appeasement for dealing with international problems. The phenomenon asuggests that there is little justification for the continuing and popular tendency to inflate threats and dangers in the international arena—even to the point of deeming some of them to be “existential.” In addition, although problems certainly continue to exist, none of these are substantial enough to require the United States (or pretty much anybody) to maintain a large standing military force for dealing with them.