But Pax Americana isn’t an act of charity. It holds distinct advantages for the United States. We’d be less safe, prosperous, and free without it.

What we are witnessing is, in broad brush, a civilizational challenge. China and Russia don’t have a formal alliance and their current cooperative arrangement may well break down over time, but they share the same interest in ending the long era of Western preeminence.

Russia can punch above its weight, but fundamentally represents a regional threat, in particular to a NATO alliance that has been a keystone of Western security. Moscow seeks to divide European countries from one another and diminish U.S. influence in Europe, toward the end of reversing the post-Cold War settlement that was the fruit of the West’s triumph over the Soviet Union.

What Putin seeks is consequential, but not nearly as sweeping as Beijing’s goal of supplanting the United States at the top of the hierarchy of nations. China wants nothing less than to restore itself as the Middle Kingdom, owed the respect and obeisance of the rest of the world.

What unites Russia and China is that they are two civilizations that feel they were humiliated and trampled by the West (Russia at the end of the Cold War, China from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th) and need to regain their rightful place in the sun. There is an ideological element to the growing challenge, as these two authoritarian regimes confront the democratic world, but the crux of the matter is cultural—neither Russia nor China has ever been a liberal democracy and each country is reacting against international norms they’ve never embraced.

Can’t we just make way for a more ambitious Russia and China? Within limits, but their maximal demands are an obvious threat to our interests.

Through our system of alliances, we have been, in effect, sponsoring international peace. Should, say, NATO unravel, there is no reason that Europe would not eventually once again become red in tooth and claw, as it has been through much of its history. Even if we could ignore or at least stay out of any future conflict, the loss of a vast zone of free, prosperous and allied counties would be a blow.

If it is expensive and burdensome to underwrite the security of countries around the world, it would be even more expensive and burdensome if a global U.S. exit or diminishment created the conditions for a major war, or if some other power—i.e., China—replaced us at the apex of world power.

There are so many advantages to our preeminent position that we take for granted. In an essay titled “After Hegemony,” former Trump official Elbridge Colby notes some of them: “Think how the American-born internet supported Silicon Valley, and vice versa, leading to a World Wide Web governed by formal laws and informal norms almost entirely of American design. Think how the desire for access to American capital markets gives American regulators de facto control over global accounting standards, or how the need to transact with American institutions allows U.S. Treasury officials to freeze the assets of designated targets anywhere in the world. Think how Americans take for granted that English is the universal language and that everyone accepts dollars. Think how the American university degree has become the preeminent global academic credential, with searching implications for everything from global educational standards to measures of professional success.”

The American order has also been, in the main, just. It is based on the sovereignty of borders and democracy as a norm, and hence has been a boon to self-governing peoples around the world. We can be overbearing and even bullying—as well as greedy, shortsighted, and wrong-headed—but U.S. leadership hasn’t been based on coercion. By and large, our allies trust us, and find our model more congenial than anything else on offer.

The previous hegemonic power, Britain, had a soft landing because Pax Britannica was replaced by Pax Americana, run by a partner that shared similar values and mindsets. The same wouldn’t be true if we hand the baton over to China.

Consider the seas. As the navalist Jerry Hendrix notes, the U.S. Navy has made the seas safe and free over the last 70 years in a way they never had been before. It’s no accident that there’s been a surge of global trade over the course of these decades that has made countries around the world more prosperous. Russia and especially China are a threat to this system, seeking greater control of the seas for their own purposes.

China wants to define a swath of the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean as its territorial waters. If the U.S. lacks the resources or will to resist this Chinese aggrandizement, the rules of the road of international commerce will change drastically in China’s favor. An enormous proportion of global trade flows through the South China Sea and East China Sea. With control of the key choke points, China would be in a position to create restrictions and fees for everyone else’s trade and privileged status for its own. Imagine a kind of perpetual supply-chain crisis imposed by China as a matter of policy.

Indeed, China doesn’t want to be a leading country among other leading countries. It wants to have its system of government considered superior to liberal democracy. It wants free access to markets, while constraining everyone else. It wants to dominate the setting of technical standards, and so influence how new technologies are developed to suit its own interests. The Belt and Road Initiative is a reflection of its vision, with China at the center and other countries in a subsidiary role.

If China achieves mastery in Asia and a position of global predominance, it won’t leave us alone to enjoy tending our garden at home. “Building upon such economic advantages,” Colby writes, “it could intrude into and shape our national life, using its position to coerce, bribe, and cajole companies, individuals, and governments to do its will, diminishing our economic vitality and, through that, our freedoms.”

Resisting these growing civilizational challenges will require continued engagement around the world and the return in certain respects to a Cold War footing, especially when it comes to the chronically underfunded defense budget. Ducking our leadership role will, eventually, mean inevitable decline and the creation of a more hostile world. Countries don’t become more prosperous and secure on their way down.