This article is from the cover package in the Fall 2024 print issue, featuring letters from thinkers around the world. Read all nine letters here.

What would you want to tell the next U.S. president? FP asked nine thinkers from around the world to write a letter with their advice for him or her.

Dear Madam or Mr. President,

The future of multilateralism might seem too diffuse as to hang on the outcome of one national election—yours—but for diplomats at the United Nations in New York and elsewhere, it does. In part, this is a well-worn cycle, of denigrating U.S. leadership as overreach when it is seen as on the up and being equally quick to condemn its departure as removing the essential anchor when it seems to be abdicating the world stage.

As you know, the United States has in truth been the mainstay of the modern multilateral system since its launch in 1945. Despite occasional threats of divorce—and on occasion actual disengagement from individual U.N. entities and nonpayment of dues—it has not deserted the system as it did the earlier League of Nations.

Much longer periods of relatively low-friction harmony have gone less noticed but reflect the temperament of an American public that has generally held a benign, if not deep, regard for the U.N. You might be surprised to learn that the Pew Research Center reports that 52 percent of Americans view the U.N. favorably in 2024. The U.N. has actually been a useful partner to successive U.S. administrations in global management—from peacekeeping to development. As Franklin D. Roosevelt envisaged, the United States, as the reluctant world police after 1945, was going to need a hand. The multilateral system was molded to provide that.

There was, admittedly, a wider alignment of values at the time. The liberal rules-based international order that prevailed first in competition with the Soviet model and then alone post-1989 and that allowed a rapid growth in open markets and democracy was a shared undertaking led by the United States but generally supported by the multilateral system.

Diplomats are right to believe today that we may be at an inflection point. Though I am writing this before the results of the election are known, to speak bluntly, these diplomats fear a new Trump administration as a threat to the very foundations of the multilateral system. But whoever prevails on Nov. 5—and congratulations, by the way—this will not change the much deeper shifts underway in the distribution of global power and values alignment that are now surfacing at the U.N. and its Bretton Woods cousins, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). They have seen an approximate quadrupling of membership since their post-World War II founding; a more than tripling of global population; and a global GDP that is more than 10 times bigger. More recent trends include the fall of the Soviet Union; the surging rise of China; the equally significant new standing of middle powers such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa; as well as a more general ambition of states across the developing world to assert agency and sovereignty in their foreign policy and development strategy. Your country once presumed to preside over a tamer world.

The U.S. role in the multilateral system is sliding. But it is not in free fall—yet. If you set out to do so, could you put it over the edge? Perhaps. But this is no ancient Greece with Rome at its gates. Your national defense spending continues comfortably to be twofold that of China and Russia combined. The United States arguably remains the most innovative economy in the world, and it still tops the league tables of wealth creation and income per capita. The combined population of those countries with higher average incomes—a handful of unequal oil-rich and other small states—is only 25 million. From Olympic medals to Nobel Prizes, the United States remains a country with a deep pool of individual and collective talent to which many of the world’s smartest continue to seek entry. For many talented individuals around the world, it remains the promised land. So leadership remains yours to lose.

But you must see there is a global shift underway, and the United States, more than ever, is not an unchallenged No. 1 but rather a precarious first among equals in a multilateral system and which in responding to wider intellectual and political change in the world resents any claim to monopoly leadership. As Shakespeare observed in his great play on succession and power, Henry IV, Part 2: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

A broad indication of this shift is provided by the declining share of the global economy enjoyed by the G-7, the club of leading U.S.-aligned economies. According to the World Bank, the G-7 accounted for almost two-thirds of global GDP in 1980; by 2022, the G-7 accounted for only 43 percent.

In a European forum such as NATO, your predecessor Joe Biden was viewed as an unalloyed triumph. Biden’s leadership on Ukraine particularly restored a trans-Atlantic bounce to Europe-U.S. relations. But at the multilateral level, the return of an old-fashioned Atlanticist and pro-Israel president was viewed more ambivalently. His priorities have not been necessarily shared by much of the rest of the world. There is, perhaps, an opportunity to bring a welcome rebalancing toward other regions.

But the more fundamental divide is that what’s good for the United States is more than ever not always good for the rest of the world. This is reflected in both political and security priorities but also economic and trade ones—and in that word again, values. There is a dangerous divergence.

By way of example, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a well-regarded Biden appointee as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., has struggled to reconcile instructions to isolate Russia for its war in Ukraine while also being required to stand almost alone in her defense of Israel’s actions in Gaza. Charges of double standards and a very different level of respect for civilian life in the two cases have become a key complaint at the U.N. This made Biden’s championing internationally of democracy seem dated and hypocritical. The United States was no longer the shining city on the hill when it came to democratic values. Democracy promotion is seen as a moralistic cover for a more cynical, interest-based U.S. foreign policy. A selective sanction is applied against the weak or America’s enemies but not its friends, such as Saudi Arabia.

You may want to trade in the term democracy for that of freedom. As in the recent U.S. presidential campaign, this resonates. The U.N. Charter follows on from Roosevelt’s original 1941 articulation of the four freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Rather than a narrow demand to emulate America’s flawed system of elections alone, your administration should put itself at the head of this wider inclusive framing that still excludes adversaries such as Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This would be a campaign that restores empathy and balance to U.S. leadership and would again muster global majorities.

Similarly, the unfolding competition with China, in which the Biden administration largely took up where the previous administration had left off, has led to protectionist economic policies—including the vast Inflation Reduction Act, which has sought to repatriate U.S. manufacturing jobs to the detriment of many U.S. trade partners; prohibitive tariff barriers denying at least U.S. consumers the potentially world-changing low cost of Chinese electric cars; and the blocking of judicial appointments in the World Trade Organization’s trade disputes appeal system, thereby gumming up the essential governance of world trade arrangements.

You may not care about any one of these consequences in isolation, but overall you should know that in one of the more perverse reversals, many developing countries now feel cheated of the open global trading system that allowed many of their neighbors to get an early foot on the development ladder. Biden’s talk of near-shoring and resilient supply lines is a retreat from the globalization that unleashed decades of development gains. He is seen as pulling away the ladder before poor countries can reap the economic benefits of cheap labor.

A closing U.S. trade system enjoys rare bipartisan support at home, but many in the world hope for a break from it—and a return to an earlier time in U.S. leadership. President Barack Obama has been given a mixed scorecard for his multilateral record largely because of his uncertain handling of political and security issues such as the Arab Spring and notably its aftermath in Syria and Libya. However, on the economic and trade side, he led an enthusiastic shift toward the G-20, which represents around 85 percent of global GDP, over the G-7—and toward Asia and a trade pact whose U.S. participation did not outlive his term. He was said to be privately impatient with a sclerotic U.N. and its history-laden protocol but an eager champion of a renewed and rebalanced multilateralism around an even more inclusive version of the G-20.

More in hope than expectation may I suggest you might consider embracing a reversion of America’s current multilateral posture: At the moment, it is on the offensive on the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars but largely on the defensive on the rest, including secondary conflicts of which there are again a growing number particularly in Africa and the wider Arab world, and on development and climate; on the latter, there is a lot of U.S. exhortation but as little cash as your predecessors could get away with or a rash deployment, in the name of green policies, against, for example, the vital energy needs of the global south. This is a misalignment—indeed, an inversion of priorities. Press for a just peace on Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas, as U.N. resolutions call for—respect for Ukraine’s sovereign boundaries and a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—but then pivot to these other priorities. Acknowledge that the long-term global problems of climate and poverty, and linked conflict and migration, threaten us all, including Americans. This is a Roosevelt-sized task for a White House heir who would pick up that mantle.

Don’t expect instant adulation abroad for what will be initially unpopular at home. U.S. leadership is inevitably declining relatively. You will be challenged by others in the multilateral system in ways your predecessors could afford to brush over, but you have to persuade yourself and your prickly America First Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, that international challenge can be healthy. Henry IV rued his uneasy hold on his crown, but amid rebellion and challenge, he exceeded your possible time in office and ushered in a three-generation Lancastrian dynasty. The United States does not need to turn in its crown just yet.