The graying and fraying of the liberal international order in the 2020s has triggered a tsunami of autopsies about what went wrong in the 1990s. Many scholars have concluded that the United States emphasized global governance structures that were divisive, triggering blowback from without and within. This chapter argues that such critiques rest on a faulty analytical premise. In lumping 1991 with previous “ordering moments” such as 1918 and 1945, international relations scholars mistakenly treat the beginning of the post–Cold War period as akin to other postwar critical junctures. The end of the Cold War, however, legitimated rather than discredited the liberal international order. The recursive power of global governance structures obviated any kind of “clean slate” option for the post–Cold War era. The fateful decisions of the 1990s that led to subsequent instability had more to do with American politics driving domestic policy choices than faulty global governance structures.