The US challenge to the legitimacy and efficacy of the international trade regime that it created, and emerging powers’ defense of that regime, is a paradox that cuts across international relations theories. John Ikenberry, in his book After Victory, published a decade after the end of the Cold War and five years after the WTO’s creation, asked this central political question: “What do states that have just won major wars do with their newly acquired powers.” His answer was a legal one: they create the rules of the game. In this situation, he wrote, states “have sought to hold onto that power and make it last” through institutionalizing it.1 He called the order that the United States created a “liberal hegemonic order” because other states consented to it in the context of American unipolar power, while the United States agreed to constrain itself under the rules to “make it acceptable.”2 Michael Zurn, in his theory of global governance, argues that such regimes endogenously create resistance because they are “embedded in a normative and institutional structure that contains hierarchies and power inequalities.” He thus contends that “counter-institutionalization is the preferred strategy by rising powers.”3 And the realist Graham Allison, in his book Destined for War, writes, “Americans urge other powers to accept a ‘rule-based international order’. But through Chinese eyes, this appears to be an order in which Americans make the rules, and others obey the orders.”4 To turn from international relations to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, Bourdieu also finds that change within a field occurs through struggles where challengers employ “subversion” strategies to undermine the legitimacy of the status quo and dominant groups deploy “conservation” strategies.5 The paradox with the trade legal order is that, although Brazil and India initially resisted and complained about the WTO, they, along with China, became its defenders, while the United States, under the Trump administration, attacked it as illegitimate and neutered its dispute settlement system.6 The United States has become the revisionist power.