Others accused me of fetishizing institutions, as if they mattered more than the conduct of states. Robert Kagan, the foreign policy pundit and historian, wrote, “I feel like the actual system, which has nothing to do with the UNSC and everything to do with the American-backed liberal hegemony, is working as it always has—defeating and/bankrupting its challengers.” The calamity I imagine would simply reinforce the central role of the United States in policing the world order. The real problem with the current system, writes Brian Katulis, vice president of policy at the Middle East Institute, “is not the system itself but the assumption many people hold that it exists independent of its constituent states and can serve as a world government-in-waiting.” NATO and the Western alliance system have held up quite well in the Russian crisis. We should expect them to evolve as the world does, rather than wait for “a blueprint either handed down from Washington or hammered out in Geneva.”