Michael Lind aptly characterizes the prevailing view of American power in the modern world, and does a decent job of tracing its origins. It's important to understand both how the world could be different from the way it is today, and why we made it work this way anyway.

But there are a few points that Lind glossed over that might bear closer scrutiny. For one thing, the American devotion to free trade is not merely some Cold War artifact, though the origins of the modern global economic regime stem from the aftermath of the Second World War, just as does most of the rest of our world.

American interest in free global trade in one form or another dates back to the birth of the country, to a time when the new republic found itself isolated in a world of burgeoning spheres of imperial influence centered in the capitals of Europe. For both idealistic and pragmatic reasons, it made sense for Americans to advocate "open door" policies wherever they could.

In addition, given its success in seizing the riches of the North American continent from its hapless neolithic inhabitants, the US has never really had to reckon with the kind of resource scarcity that made mercantile colonialism so appealing to European powers. What the Americans wanted, by virtue of their economy and their character, was trade, not raw materials; and immigration, not places to which to emigrate.

Those strains run deep throughout virtually every American engagement with the rest of the world over the past 2 centuries. The Cold War era saw a new variation on the theme, as the US was for the first time in its history in the position of more or less uncontested military and economic power throughout the world. Our most serious rivals were those who basically opted entirely out of the system of world trade, and tried desperately to keep pace with American power through the sustained crisis of revolutionary anxiety — basically a permanent state of panic, duct tape, and baling wire that substituted for real economic strength. But for all that, the American vision of the postwar order was not all that different from what it had been a hundred years earlier with the opening of the Far East.

All of which raises the other point. While talk of "World War 3" is facile, there is something to be said — possibly a great deal in fact — for geopolitical force majeur that we who benefit from it may not appreciate.

The "something" to be said is simply this: people believe in the American Peace. It may be hard to believe, given how much we meddle and how many tinpot dictators and authoritarian reptiles we've supported over the years, but so long as the world at large a) feels that on balance things are more peaceful this way, and b) doesn't want to shell out the considerable sums of money required to do it themselves instead, the American proposition — we'll build and maintain all the fleets if you let us put our thumb on the scales of the world economy — the status quo will have a broad base of default support.

The "possibly a great deal" to be said is less clear. What if it's not a general world war we face but a world of constant, escalating, multilateral militarization, in which trade disputes that turn sour can also wind up turning violent, business everywhere has to be done in cash or not at all, and world travelers always have to watch their backs.

The World War 3 comparison is childish. It's what unimaginative American policy wonks think of when they try to imagine this hypothetical multipolar future, because the huge world wars of the last century are all they know anything about. But the truth is that we have no template for what the world would (or will) become after the end of the American regime — the one thing we can be assured of is that it will not look like anything we've ever seen before, or anything we can grasp, because the modern world has never operated under those principles.

The American empire did not appear out of nowhere, as some received idea that was imposed on humanity from on high by the jack-booted thugs of some repressive autocracy. It grew and emerged party as a consensual construct. It has benefited in no small part simply from our half-shrewd, half-opportunistic management of other people's massively catastrophic foolishness. And it provides many benefits to many people both in the US and throughout the world.

It's easy to pooh pooh all of it as just a veneer of security and tranquility over a mean and bloody world, but people value that a great deal. Don't forget who first observed: "...all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

The American regime about which Michael Lind writes is the world to which we are all accustomed. Before we can persuade people in any large numbers that overthrowing it is an effort to which they should set their shoulders, it might help to understand what we're risking and what we intend to replace it with.