Woody Allen’s quip that 80 percent of life is just showing up would have served well as the motto of the liberal international order. For the three decades following the end of the Cold War, the organizing principle of international relations was access through presence. Show up to NATO, and you are defended. Show up to the WTO, and you get market access. Show up at the border, and you have rights. The liberal order incentivized and rewarded participation, not any particular contribution. Compliance was nominal, enforcement was soft, and the underwriter of the whole arrangement—the United States—absorbed the difference between what countries contributed and what they received.
One of the clearest examples was the security bargain between Washington and Europe. In 2014, when NATO allies pledged to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense, only three of them actually met the target. Germany—the largest economy in Europe, sheltered behind 80,000 US troops on its soil—spent 1.2 percent. Its defense officials admitted that only 70 of its 180 armored vehicles were operational, that fewer than half its fighter jets could fly, and that its navy helicopters were mostly grounded. None of this triggered any penalty. Germany remained fully covered by NATO’s security guarantee, fully integrated into the transatlantic market, and fully represented at every institutional table. Showing up was enough.
It wasn’t just allies who exploited this system. Iran signed the JCPOA, received sanctions relief, and used the resulting breathing room to inch its way to nuclear weapons and entrench a regional architecture of proxy warfare and terror.