At the Munich Security Conference last weekend, prospective standard-bearers for the left and right flanks of mainstream US politics offered dramatically different narrative accounts of the postwar period of American hegemony. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, looking to establish a foreign policy vision ahead of a potential presidential run in 2028, described a set of ostensibly universal promises made by the West that were ultimately unfulfilled in the Global South: The supposed “rules-based order,” which sought to secure non-aggression after the world wars, only seemed to apply for the former colonial powers. By contrast, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, also a 2028 hopeful, lamented a shameful retreat from the glory of European colonial empires. After half a millennium of racial supremacy—culminating, according to Rubio, in “the genius of . . .…