State power and international institutions: America and the logic of economic and security multilateralism

The United States has been one of the great champions of multilateral, rulebased international order, but it has also frequently sought to resist and exempt itself from entangling institutional obligations. Across the twentieth century – and in particular at the major postwar turning points of 1919, 1945 and 1989 – the United States pursued ambitious strategies that entailed the use of an array of multilateral institutions to remake international order. No other great power has advanced such far-reaching and elaborate ideas about how institutions might be employed to organize and manage the relations between states. But despite this enthusiasm for creating institutions and a rule-based international order, the United States has been reluctant to tie itself too tightly to these multilateral institutions and rules (Ikenberry 2003).