You want the real answer? Here it is: You institutionalize your power so that it becomes more efficient to wield. All entities who develop or acquire hard power tend to institutionalize it. If you don’t, you have to continuously exercise your power nakedly while wielding it, i.e. “do X or I will use my power to hurt you.” This also engenders resentment and breeds resistance. Institutionalization takes advantage of the human mind to conform to rules out of habit. An institution is just a set of rules. You make them up. So you make up a bunch of rules that say things like “if you do any of these things, the institution says you must be punished [and it will be enforced via my power]” or “if you do this, you will be rewarded by the institution [where I will be the one to dole out the reward]” and most importantly “if you want to do X, you must do it according to process Y [which happens to benefit me and not threaten my other interests].” This obscures the threat of naked power behind a set of “fair” rules. All institutions and rules have existed like this since the dawn of civilization. They are a way of telling the people who are being dominated when and how they can expect their rulers to act, what tribute they must pay, and what protection from competing rulers they will receive. And, many people conflate consistency with fairness, or at least familiarity, so it reduces resentment at being dominated. At the end of WW2, the US ruled by way of military supremacy over Western Europe. NATO was an institution that used the threat of a competing ruler (Russia) to say “if you conform to our rules and do things our way, we’ll protect you.” By and large Europe conforms to US-led cultural and economic wishes, and the US even lets them shirk their military contributions because by doing so, it keeps the other countries weak (vs competing rulers) and dependent on the US for protection. Yes, they are freeloaders. This is by design. The best way to dominate someone is to provide them free protection and material comfort (turn them into a freeloader), and then they become dependent on you and you can control them. If you think Europe isn’t controlled by the US, it’s because you’ve probably grown up in a world where that was assumed. As a contrast, a developed country that isn’t controlled by the US is China, and that’s so bizarre to the typical US experience that many Americans consider China an *enemy* when it’s merely just not under US control. That’s what it looks like. Western Europe, on the other hand, allows the US to put military bases on its sovereign territory which, if you think about it objectively, is pretty much the greatest act of submission a sovereign country can commit. And it does so because it’s done under the guise of NATO (“we’re all in this together… uhh even though the US runs 90% of the show”). So the benefit to MY COUNTRY is that NATO lets the US be completely in charge of Western Europe without looking overtly like it’s in charge, and do what is in effect what used to be called colonization by maintaining military bases in foreign territory (imagine how this would look to any country prior to 1900) and all sorts of cultural and economic dominance besides. It has been able to maintain this dominance system for DECADES now without any of the countries getting mad (getting mad for real constitutes kicking out the US military bases, not whining about freedom or other crap). Incidentally, the World Bank and IMF and other institutions like this all serve the same purpose. They are largely run by the US, and used to control everyone else who participates by obscuring US hard power behind - and here it is - “an international rules-based order” because getting to make up the rules (because you have the hard power) sets up a system where everyone else plays by YOUR rules, the ones that benefit you.