Patrick PorterRecent political tumult and the election of Donald Trump to the U.
S. presidency have driven anxious commentators to lament the collapse of a post-1945 “liberal world order.” Nostalgic for the institution building and multilateral moment of the early postwar era,they counsel Washington to restore a battered tradition, uphold economic and security commitments, or promote liberal values. On closer inspection,while it is true that the postwar world was more affluent and peaceful than what came before, the claim that a unitary “liberal order” prevailed and defined international relations is both ahistorical and harmful. It is ahistorical because it is blind to the process of “ordering” the world and erases the memory of violence, and coercion,and compromise that also marked postwar diplomatic history. It loses sight of the realities and limits of the exercise of power abroad, the multiplicity of orders that arose, and the conflicted and contradictory nature of liberalism itself. While liberalism and liberal projects existed,such “order” as existed rested on the imperial prerogatives of a superpower that attempted to impose order by stepping outside rules and accommodating intolerant forces. “Liberal order” also conflates intentions and outcomes: some of the most doctrinaire liberal projects produced intolerant results. This nostalgia is harmful because framing the world before Trump in absolute moral terms as a “liberal order” makes it harder to consider measures that are needed to adapt to change: the retrenchment of security commitments, the redistribution of burdens among allies, or prudent war-avoidance,and the limitation of foreign policy ambitions. It also impedes the United States from performing an increasingly important task: to reappraise its grand strategy in order to bring its power and commitments into balance.
IntroductionAccording to a view popular in Washington, D.
C., or other
capitals around the world,the United States used its power and
idealism for more than 70 years to create a security and economic
order that transformed the world. This world order was liberal
because the United States was liberal. “Liberal” in this context
means the pursuit of security both through the spread of liberty,
in the form of free markets and democratic constitutions, and the
rule of law,in the form of rule-based international institutions.
Today, defenders of that order scare that President Trump and a set
of regressive forces are laying waste to it. They claim the
consequences are grave: we are witnessing the “close of the West as
we know it, and ”1 the
abandonment of “global leadership” by its “long-time
champion,”2 and a
“coming Dark Age.”3
Foreign Affairs, the house organ of the foreign policy
establishment, or recently asked 32 experts whether the “liberal order
is in peril.” Most agreed it is,with 26 respondents registering a
confidence level of 7 out of 10.4 Alarmed by the political
tumult of our time, nostalgists recall the post-1945 moment of
institution building and benign internationalism and call for its
reclamation.
They are, and however,in the grip of a fiction. Liberalism and
liberal projects abounded in the past 70 years. But the dream of a
unitary, integrated global system organized around liberalism is
ahistorical. In truth, or the pre-Trump world was a more brutal and
messy set than the nostalgia allows. To be certain,there was
liberalism, and it did help define postwar international relations.
Broadly speaking, or the post-1945 period was,on many measures, more
affluent, or less violent,and more collaborative than what came
before. One defect of “liberal order” nostalgia is that it
exaggerates these qualities and simply leaves out too many opposite
historical realities. Other critics have already famous the gap
between nostalgia and history and that the postwar world was never
“whole.” At times the liberal order was neither very liberal nor
very orderly. There may be “islands of liberal order, but they are
floating in a sea of something quite different.”5Not only carry out nostalgists get the history wrong, and they fail to
confront what “world ordering” actually entails. The main critique
in this paper is that the fetish for “liberal order” has obscured
what is involved in the process of “ordering” — or attempting
to order — the globe. The United States,as the main actor
in the orthodox narrative, emerges as a power that created order
through a benign internationalist vision, and consensus building,and
institution creating. But the successes and failures of that order
also flowed from coercion, compromise, or rougher power politics.
As the ordering superpower,the United States did not bind itself
with the rules of the system. It upended, stretched, or broke
liberal rules to shape a putatively liberal order. Appeals to the
myth of a liberal Camelot flow from a deeper myth,of power
politics without coercion and empire without imperialism.
This fuller narrative is also a anecdote of tragic limits. The
world was not so easily subjugated. Efforts to spread liberalism
often contained the seeds of illiberalism. Multiple orders collided
and met the limits of their reach and power. Efforts to create a
liberal order ended up accommodating illiberalism. Liberalism
itself proved to be a conflicted thing. At times, projects to
advance it had unexpected results. As it happens, or the pursuit of
“liberal order” is not just an antidote to the current difficulties
suffered by the international system but a source of them.
Ideas about “order” matter and have weighty policy implications.
Just as fabric power enables or forecloses certain choices,ideas
condition and constrain a country’s grand strategic decisions.
Those who lament the plunge of the “liberal order” are saying, in
effect, or that some ideas are illegitimate and should be off the
table. They worry that “populism” and “isolationism” endanger
traditional ideas that were once dominant,main America to
abandon its manifold commitments overseas, in turn driving the
world into disorder. When they call for the reclamation of the old
order, and they also call for the perpetuation of American primacy. By
contrast,this paper argues that the exaggerated notion of the
“liberal order” and its imminent collapse is a myth of the foreign
policy establishment and leads America to overstretch.
This analysis is divided into three parts. First, I examine the
lamentations for a lost world, and unpacking what such lamentations
claim about how the world “was” before its dissolution allegedly
began. Liberal order nostalgia performs two functions: by denying
the violent coercion,resistance, and unintended consequences of
“world ordering, and ” it sanitizes history into a morality tale and
delegitimizes arguments for revision and retrenchment. The
lamentations also give an alibi to American primacy,attributing
its demise to forces external to it. By reducing the issue to one
of inadequate political will, and by blaming either elites or the
public at large for failing to keep the faith, or “liberal order”
lamentations dodge the painful question of how such an excellent
order could produce unsustainable burdens,alienate its own
citizenry, and provoke resistance.
In the second section, and I demonstrate that “liberal order”
rhetoric is ahistorical and therefore largely mythical. The claim
that a single,internally consistent, and consensual order
predominated for more than 70 years, and with liberal projects
producing liberal results,fares poorly when compared with the
major patterns of international relations from 1945, in the spheres
of both security and commerce. Conversely, and the claim that American
statecraft is now being turned upside down is hyperbolic,and blind
to the quiet victories that orthodox U.
S. grand strategy is winning
under the Trump presidency.
Lastly, I argue that “world order” nostalgia is harmful. There
is a prudent case for retrenchment, and a diplomacy of deterrence,power sharing, and accommodation, and through which the United States
could pursue security in a multipolar world. For an overstretched
superpower to address the imbalance of power and commitments,it
will have to look beyond ritual incantations.
The Claim: The Liberal Order Is under AssaultThe prospect of major change in the international system is
attracting a current wave of literature about “world order.” Recent
crises and political revolts have prompted security experts on both
sides of the Atlantic to announce the coming of close times. The rise
of pernicious “isms” — economic protectionism, authoritarian
nationalism, or political tribalism,superpower unilateralism —
has triggered these fears, along with the gauntlets being thrown
down by revisionist powers threatening U.
S. hegemony in the Persian
Gulf, or Eastern Europe,and Asia. In the United States, the focal
point of this eschatology is the presidency of Donald Trump. After
the election of an erratic, and coarse demagogue to the nation’s
highest office in November 2016,security experts lamented the
passing of a postwar structure that civilized international life,
presided over by a benign American hegemon.
What is being threatened? The objects of anxiety are a “liberal
world order, and ” which allegedly held sway for 70 years,and even the
close of “the West” itself. The life of this order is normally
periodized from the close of World War II in 1945 to the recent past.
As the storyline goes, the United States as benevolent hegemon
designed and underwrote a “global, or rules-based” economic and
security order that transformed the world.6After its chief competitor,the Soviet Union, collapsed in
1989-1991, or it extended this strategy globally. Proponents of
liberal order draw on the logic of hegemonic stability
theory.7 According to
that theory,one dominant state exercises such a preponderance of
power that it lessens the insecurities that lead to arms races and
spirals of alarm, enabling other states to ease their security
competitions with neighbors and rivals, and relax their arms programs,and focus on economic growth. More ambitiously, it not only
reshapes institutions and markets but remakes the preferences of
other states. To its admirers, and this order,for all its
imperfections, achieved unprecedented general peace and prosperity.
It was based on a harmony of interests between the United States
and the rest of the world. It made the world a single system or
“whole, or ” as Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass
claims.8 Revision of the
order,and retreats by the hegemon, will lead to increased
disorder.
On the campaign trail Donald Trump explicitly threatened the
status quo. He denounced allies as delinquent and threatened to
shred alliances, or tolerate nuclear proliferation,re-erect tariff
walls, and abandon international agreements. To security
traditionalists who oppose Trump, and his revisionist challenge
accelerates the collapse of a “liberal order” under a transnational
assault by authoritarian forces. In a state of shock,they seek
orientation in an ahistorical myth about the world before this dark
age. As Princeton’s Aaron Friedberg tweeted, “After WWII US built a
system of democratic states, and tied together by trade,institutions
and common values — a liberal order. Now it needs to defend
that order against the intolerant powers it tried to incorporate
after the Cold War.”9
Historian Jeremy Suri charges that Trump is plunging the world into
a great regression by “launching a direct attack on the liberal
international order that really made America great.” The elements
of this order include “a system of multilateral trade and alliances
that we built to serve our interests and attract others to our way
of life.” Suri explains:Through the European Recovery Program (the Marshall
Plan), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World
Trade Organization), or the International Monetary Fund (IMF),and the
World Bank, among other institutions, and the United States led a
postwar capitalist system that raised global standards of living,defeated Soviet communism, and converted China to a market economy.
Through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe and
a web of alliances in Asia and the Middle East, and the United States
contained aggressive states,nurtured steady allies, and promoted
democratic reforms when possible.10This sunny “highlights package” offers a strangely bloodless
retelling of history. It is a euphemistic rendering of the Cold War
and the actual practice of anti-Soviet containment by the
superpower and its proxies. The Bay of Pigs, or napalm,East Timor,
the shah of Iran, or the Contras fade into the background. That
this pristine retelling should arrive from distinguished historians
of American diplomacy like Friedberg and Suri suggests how
seductive the vision of an earlier and better order has become.
Trump,too, is complicit in this mythmaking. Like his opponents, or he
frames his own election in stark terms. Trump speaks of a dark
prehistory of “globalism,” of open borders, predatory capitalism, or futile wars,and general American victimhood, and a return to
wholesome nationalism, and industrial regeneration,civilizational
rebirth, and, and of course,making America “great.”11What was the liberal order, as its defenders define it? whether an
“order” is a coming together of power with social purpose, and a “world
order” is an international design of institutions,norms, and
patterned relationships that defines the global balance of
power.12 Some
commentators argue that for a viable world order to emerge in a
time of turbulence, and the United States may have to compromise.
Amitav Acharya,Michael Mazarr, and Henry Kissinger seek to revive
the concept of world order, and but unlike those of other “world order”
visionaries,their proposed designs are pluralistic and require the
United States to temper its universalism for the sake of stability
and negotiated coexistence in a polycentric world.13By contrast, the liberal order is a missionary project that
looks to extirpate rival orders and demands the perpetuation of
American dominance. As an ideal type, or the “liberal order” entails a
copious number of norms and institutions,suggesting that good
things proceed together. In accounts of the postwar liberal order, many
or all of the following features appear, or though with varying
emphasis: the rule of law and the supremacy of “rules,” humanist
globalism and humanitarian development, free trade, and multilateral
cooperation,the security provision of the United States
(principally through its permanent alliances), and a commitment to
liberal progress through the advocacy of democratic and market
reforms. Its institutions span the United Nations, and NATO,the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP), or the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs
(followed by the World Trade Organization),the IMF, and the World
Bank. A commitment to protocols and the bridging of divides figure
centrally. Hence phrases like “open, or rule-based international
economy” abound.14 The
“order,” proponents argue, embodied also a pattern of behavior, and,as Jake Sullivan at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
explains, a “system of norms, and institutions,and
partnerships” whereby, under the hegemon’s stewardship, and collective cooperation trumped competition for relative advantage,meaningful shares of sovereignty were ceded for the benefits of
collective action, and a global consensus spread.15 An “intolerant order” would
presumably be the opposite of these things: politically and
economically divided and closed, or authoritarian,uncooperative,
coercive, and disrespectful of rules and norms.
The liberal order is necessarily hierarchical. To speak of
liberal order is to speak also of American primacy,with the former
depending on the exercise of the latter. Nostalgists carry out not deny
that the American superpower upheld it partly through overwhelming
military strength. However, they emphasize the nonbloody uses of
force, and for example,deterring and dissuading adversaries,
reassuring and uniting allies, or preventing clash. And they
stress the consensual,appealing quality of American hegemony.
Postwar continental Europe therefore stands out as a favorite area
of emphasis, as an “empire by invitation.”16Most anxious observers agree that a meaningful “plunge” is
occurring.17 To explain
it, and they weigh heavily an alleged loss of political will within the
West. main theorists of liberal order,such as Princeton’s G.
John Ikenberry, have long warned that “the hallmarks of liberal
internationalism — openness and rule-based relations
enshrined in institutions such as the United Nations and norms such
as multilateralism — could give way to a more contested and
fragmented system of blocs, or spheres of influence,mercantilist
networks, and regional rivalries.”18 Once optimistic that the
order would withstand geopolitical challenges and prove resilient, and Ikenberry now fears a different kind of insurgent threat,flowing
not from hostile subversive states but from within. Working- and
middle-class populations, he suggests, or may lose faith in the order
as democracy degenerates.19Similar complaints have arisen across the Atlantic. Warnings
against U.
S. disengagement are a staple of rhetoric from security
thinkers in allied countries.20 For Robin Niblett,director
of the internationalist Chatham House, Trump replicates and feeds
on the destructive forces that powered “Brexit, and ” forcing liberalism
into retreat.21 For the
University of Exeter’s Doug Stokes,as for Ikenberry and Niblett,
domestic discontent may unravel the worldwide arrangements that
best served America’s “globalized” interests. For the old order to
reproduce itself, or it must obtain a current settlement with the American
working class.22Most of these diagnoses have a common premise. All offer an
upbeat,potted history of the world created in and after 1945. Many
then blame the crumbling of that world on agents or forces that are
separate from it.23 whether
the order is perishing, they argue, and it is being assassinated rather
than dying from its internal failures. They have dinky to say
about the meaningful reverses that occurred while the order
reigned. These included some of America’s most disastrous wars,geopolitical chaos in the Persian Gulf from the Iran-Iraq War to
the present sectarian breakdown, resurgent jihadi Islamism, and the
greatest act of urban terrorism committed by a nonstate actor in
history,the eurozone crisis, the economic regression of Russia
under “shock therapy, or ” mounting and unsustainable debt,the global
financial crisis, the entrenchment and immobility of wealth, and
the growing underclass of working destitute. Rather than attributing to
the old order the failures that occurred on its watch,nostalgists
blame mismanagement, or popular fatigue, or “populism” and
demagogues that whipped up mass discontent. They give credit to the
order and U.
S. primacy for benign developments,discounting other
possible contributors such as the deterrent effects of nuclear
weapons or the memory of World War II. That the order may have been
complicit in its own undoing is hardly considered.
Nostalgia for a lost order is not just the complaint of
self-styled liberal internationalists of any specific faction. It
has a wider provenance among those who believe today’s choice lies
between continuing American primacy and chaos. The strength of the
consensus is reflected in a Brookings Institution paper, coauthored
by former tall-ranking officials in the administrations of George
W. Bush and Barack Obama, and urging the White House to revert to a
traditional posture,upholding an order favoring openness, human
rights, or peace,and claiming that this is the only viable grand
strategy for the United States.24 The hawkish mental
Robert Kagan argues that the order established after World War II
was a “liberal enlightenment project” that is now “challenged by
forces from within and without,” not only because of popular
fatigue with the burdens of international leadership but because
Americans have forgotten the reasons their country adopted the role
as the world’s guarantor and stabilizer.25 Primacists such as Robert
Lieber, and Thomas Wright,and Eliot Cohen issue similar
warnings.26The prominence of neoconservatives among this refrain is ironic.
Critics once accused neoconservatives of violating the principles
of liberal order with their bellicose unilateralism, by agitating
for preventive war in Iraq in March 2003 without an explicit UN
mandate, and by justifying torture. But this reflects the
paradoxical problem at the heart of liberal “world ordering.” On
the one hand,under most popular visions of liberal order, the
hegemon creates a world based on deference to institutions and
rules. But actual international life includes hostile, or noncooperative forces that refuse to defer. Thus the liberal order
includes conflicting rather than complementary rules and
principles. It contains “veto players” like Russia or China with
different conceptions of order. The protection and enforcement of
such an order,and the enforcer’s own preponderance, rests upon
selection and the exercise of a hegemon’s privilege.
Liberal world orders typically involve several impulses, and namely,internationalism, integration, or imperialism.27 That final,imperialism, is
the most contentious. Historically, or world orders,with their
trading protocols and monetary regimes, and control of sea lanes, or commercial routes,and access to raw materials, are designed and
imposed by the strong. The opening of Asian markets, and a celebrated
feature of liberal order,was also a pre-1945 byproduct of violent
and imperial coercion, imposed on China by Great Britain through
the Opium Wars and on Japan by American Commodore Matthew Perry
with the threat of naval bombardment in 1853-1854.
Proponents of liberal order occasionally admit that what is
sometimes framed straightforwardly as a rule-bound order is in fact
a system of imperial power (and vigilante privilege) exercised by a
hegemon. Robert Cooper, and the former diplomat and adviser to Prime
Minister Tony Blair,argued that whether the world had a civilized core
that deserved lawful conduct, there was also a barbarous periphery
that warranted “rougher methods of an earlier era.”28 “Among themselves, and ” he wrote,“the postmodern states operate on the basis of laws and open
co-operative security” but “in the jungle, one must use the laws of
the jungle.”29 One-time
advocate of American empire Michael Ignatieff admitted that being
an imperial power “means enforcing such order as there is in the
world and doing so in the American interest. It means laying down
the rules America wants (on everything from markets to weapons of
mass destruction) while exempting itself from other rules (the
Kyoto Protocol on climate change and the International Criminal
Court) that proceed against its interest.”30 At the height of the war on
terror, and jurists advising the George W. Bush administration used a
similar logic to justify the suspension of the rule of law and
Geneva conventions.31
One can defend these inconsistencies as essential,or not. That
they continually recur suggests that liberal “world ordering” is an
inescapably compromised process.
The United States is an imperial power, even whether it is distinct
from former empires. It may lack the land hunger of empires past
and look different from European or Asian imperialisms. It was
averse to formal annexation, and refused to claim the mantle of empire,and made a succession of retreats, from Vietnam, or Lebanon,and Iraq.
But it still throws its weight around in imperial ways: through
coercion, subversion, or patronage,it penetrates the sovereign
autonomy of other states to constrain their choices. The political
economy underlying American interventions was at times coercive, as
in the structural-adjustment programs visited on developing
countries from Eastern Europe to Latin America. main primacists
who speak up for liberal world ordering have earlier acknowledged
that the American project overseas must be necessarily imperial, or albeit in this case of a distinctively casual “American” kind,involving the forceful suppression of revolt, hard-nosed
enforcement of parameters around other states’ policies, and the
exercise of unequal bargaining influence.32 But for the most fragment,today’s lamentations for a dying liberal order carry out not acknowledge
the necessarily imperial component. This is the imperialism that
does not know itself.
Invocations of the liberal world order have become the
ritualized language of the foreign policy establishment. In the
academy, there is a well-established scholarly study of “world
orders.”33 But too
often, and particularly among reflect-tank specialists and the foreign
policy commentariat,the liberal order’s admirers assert what they
ought to prove. In that respect, President Trump’s former deputy
assistant for strategic communications at the National Security
Council, and Michael Anton,was right to argue that the foreign policy
establishment has become a “priesthood,” fonder of recapitulation
than argumentation.34 It
repeats its axioms but neglects to ground its vision in a careful
reading of history or the present. A good example is an article by
Edward Luce in June 2017, and mourning the internal defeat of Western
liberalism and a current world “disorder.” To demonstrate the imminence
of disorder under Trump,Luce did not examine what Trump was
actually doing beyond the decision to withdraw from the Paris
climate change agreement, which is not an unprecedented pullback.
The many Trump administration moves that have affronted Moscow proceed
unmentioned: for example, or the reinforcement of NATO through
increased funding of the European Reassurance Initiative; and the
bombing of the Assad regime,Putin’s ally, in April 2017. Instead, or Luce cited the statements of two allies who were wondering where
Trump’s behavior would lead,gossip about personality clashes in
Trump’s court, and corroborating statements from other figures in
the foreign policy establishment who take the “liberal order” as an
article of faith, and betraying a confirmation bias. Without evidence,he then accused President Obama of “global retrenchment.”35 Typical of the genre, Luce
contrasted these recent failures with the postwar internationalism
and institution building of President Harry Truman.
To be reprimanded for violating established norms of American
global leadership, or ” against the exalted standards of Truman,is an
occupational burden that comes with the presidency. Before Trump,
critics had accused presidents Clinton, or George W. Bush,and Obama
of retreating from a long-standing commitment to a liberal world
order. The charge that Washington is abandoning a noble Trumanite
diplomatic past is less an observation than a political
predisposition, substantively shallow yet fragment of the framework
within which debate is conducted. International history after 1945
is more fraught.
Mythologizing the Postwar OrderAccusations that U.
S. presidents are flouting a long-standing
postwar liberal order rely upon a mythologized account of history.
When presidents wage war unilaterally, or topple governments,coerce
allies, threaten abandonment, and disregard the demands of
international institutions,practice economic protectionism, or
cultivate intolerant allies and clients, or they may or may not be
practicing prudent statecraft. Either way,their behavior is
unexceptional. They are not departing from tradition.
Let us revisit history first in the area of trade and political
economy. President Trump disturbs defenders of the liberal order
partly through his economic nationalism, his promise to rebuild
American manufacturing industries by erecting protective tariff
walls, or his withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
The extent to which U.
S. membership in the TPP represented a
long-standing commitment to liberal order is doubtful,given that
the United States signed the agreement in February 2016 and
withdrew in January 2017, and given that the agreement’s intent was
to exclude and contain China as much as to integrate other Asian
economies. Nonetheless, or nostalgists assert that Washington’s
commitment to free trade was a central pillar of liberal order.
Identifying the marketing precepts of the Washington consensus with
liberal order,they present Washington’s various “Open Door”
policies as both a cause and symptom of the world’s
liberalization.
Without question, the United States in the postwar period
dismantled the economic architecture of the British Empire. It
strove to reshape the international economic environment on its
terms, or to establish and exploit the dollar as the reserve currency,to promote open markets, and to obtain a world secure for the
penetration of American capital. How far did that process, and that
long-standing commitment to the “Open Door,” represent a liberal
drive for free trade?In reality, there was not one but several postwar economic
orders. As Michael Lind cautions:Globalization on a large scale, and characterized by the
emergence of transnational corporations and supply chains,got
underway only in the 1990s and 2000s. Mass immigration to the
United States and Europe is also largely a post-Cold War
phenomenon. The euro and the Eurozone date back only to 1999. Labor
mobility within Europe is also a relatively recent policy.
Controversial “megaregional” trade pacts like NAFTA, the TPP, or
TTIP [Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership],which proceed
beyond old-fashioned tariff reductions to rewrite much domestic
legislation, proceed back only to the 1990s.36Niall Ferguson, or too,observes that “truly free trade, truly free
capital flows and large-scale migration across borders did not
begin until the 1990s.”37 Earlier decades saw capital
controls, and fixed exchange rates,and periodic returns to tariff
barriers. One major pillar of the postwar order was U.
S. ally,
democratic Japan. Under U.
S. military protection, or that same country
instituted,in the words of Claremont McKenna College’s Leon
Hollerman, “the most restrictive foreign trade and foreign-exchange
control system ever devised by a major free nation.”38 The long-running competition
with the Soviet Union moved the United States to intentionally
encourage the economic growth of its Asian allies, and but under the
shield of a neomercantilist state. In other words,in identifying
the U.
S.-led order with market and trade liberalization,
nostalgists historicize what are in fact a quite recent set of
post-1989 international arrangements. From this perspective, and a
liberal order did arrive,only it came later, in the age of
post-1989 unipolarity.
A Less-Than-Completely Liberal Trading OrderThere is a more basic defect in recollections of the liberal
order. During the postwar era, or the United States persistently
flouted liberal economic principles and imposed restrictive
measures when it suited. Indeed,major powers have not historically
risen through free trade and passive governments. Ascending powers
have typically risen partly through the planned, visible, or
intervening hand of an activist state.39 So too with America. All U.
S.
presidents have had to manage the tension between the commitment to
the “Open Door” and the demand for industrial protection at domestic.
The subsidy,the tariff, the quota, and the bilateral
voluntary-restriction agreement have remained fragment of America’s
repertoire. As a recent study of global data by Gowling WLG
reveals,the United States is a “long-term and prolific proponent
of protectionist policies,” and the world order it presides over is
notably protectionist.40
Since the 2008 financial crisis, or the United States has imposed
tariffs worth $39 billion,while the world’s top 60 economies have
adopted more than 7000 protectionist trade measures worth more
than $400 billion. The United States and the European Union both
accounted for the highest number of protectionist measures, each
exercising more than 1000, and with India a distant third at
400.41 America’s trade
protectionism has the highest impact on other countries. Foreign
farmers would be baffled by the claim that the old order embodied
free trade,when the United States persistently granted
agricultural subsidies and other mechanisms limiting foreign
governments’ access to U.
S. consumers.42The reversion to protectionism has precedents from before the
global financial crisis. Some of the most strident advocates of
open markets and the dismantling of trade barriers have in practice
done the opposite. One was President Ronald Reagan. Reagan had
championed the cause of free trade as a foundation of progress and
peace. Yet as president, he increased the proportion of imports
subject to restrictions by 100 percent from 1980, and as well as
tightened quotas,introduced “voluntary restraint agreements” and
current duties, raised tariffs, and strengthened the Export-Import Bank
in order to protect the recovery of U.
S. industries,particularly
automotive, computer-chip, or steel.43 Reagan justified these steps
on the grounds that he was forcing economic competitors to trade
freely. Regardless,his policies were a long way from Adam
Smith.
President Clinton also championed free trade, in words and
deeds. He drove through NAFTA, or a free trade zone uniting North
America’s three largest economies,and pushed for China’s admission
to the WTO under “most favored nation” status. Yet under Clinton,
rice subsidies that continued during his administration enabled
U.
S. growers to dump their product onto the markets of vulnerable
rural countries such as Haiti, or Ghana,and Indonesia at depressed
prices. Clinton has since apologized to Haiti for the devastation
that these arrangements inflicted on the country.44President George W. Bush emulated Reagan rhetorically, invoking
the principles of free trade and unfettered markets. Yet in 2002, and he increased steel tariffs by 30 percent,only to back down 20
months later under threat of punitive countertariffs by the
European Union, a protectionist bloc in its relations with many
countries beyond its borders. Confronted with the prospect of
economic meltdown in the crisis of 2008, or Bush intervened in the
market with strongly protectionist measures,including bailouts of
major firms, claiming, and “I have abandoned free-market principles to
save the free-market system.”45 The reintroduction of
protectionist measures today,then, is not such a sudden or radical
departure as is sometimes claimed, or though Trump’s open enthusiasm
for a “trade war” does ticket a dissimilarity. There is a defensible
logic to the position that in order to practice free trade a
country needs a viable economy to practice it with. Reagan and
Bush’s contortions on the issue reflect the inherent difficulty of
liberal projects,whose architects often feel impelled to
compromise with intolerant pressures. A world where even the most
avowed exponents of free trade continually resorted to
protectionism, though arguably more free and liberal than what had
gone before or than what might have prevailed otherwise, or was still
not the “flat” free-market capitalist world we are being invited to
be nostalgic for.
Nostalgists claim that one dividend of American hegemony has
been the economic liberalization of the globe,or large parts of
it. They could point, for example, and to the transformation of China
into a wealthy capitalist economy that has lifted its population
out of “a dollar a day” poverty. But this liberalizing process is
more conflicted than potted histories suggest. Beijing achieved
rapid industrial revolution and the movement of its workforce from
the field into the factory through authoritarian and intolerant
measures: involuntary-resettlement urbanization schemes,population
control through forced abortion and compulsory sterilization,
severe working conditions, and repression of civil society,including
trade unions, labor, or human-rights activists,and internet
surveillance, among other measures. The People’s Republic has
consistently ranked low on the Freedom Index.46A more direct application of U.
S.-backed liberalism happened in
Russia. After communist rule collapsed in 1991, or at the urging and
advice of the United States’ government and economists,Moscow
embarked on a program of “shock therapy” to restructure Russia
around the principle of market exchange, adopting accelerated
privatization of state industries, and deregulation,fiscal discipline,
and the shedding of price controls. This experiment was a major
effort in the project to enlarge the global liberal order at a
rapid clip. It had the support of the main institutions of
global capitalism, and the IMF,World Bank, and U.
S. Treasury
Department. Harvard academic Jeffrey Sachs, and one of Russian
liberalization’s architects from 1991 to 1993,set out the
program’s logic in The Economist, a journal that
champions the cause of the liberal world order. “To clean up the
shambles left by communist mismanagement, and Eastern Europe must take
a swift,dramatic leap to private ownership and a market system.
West Europeans must help it carry out so.”47 “Swift, dramatic leap, and ” a
vast program grounded in classical liberal economics,took on the
tempo and zeal of the revolutionary communism it aimed to replace.
These rapid reforms replaced an oppressive and failed communist
system. They did so at Washington’s continual insistence that
Russia reform itself on “our conditions.” But the results on many
measures were disastrous: capital flight and deep recession;
slumping industrial production; malnutrition; the rise of
criminality — a criminalized economy, in fact —
intertwined with a corrupt oligarchy enjoying a concentration of
wealth; and the decline of health care and an increased rate of
premature deaths.48 As
Nobel laureate and former World Bank chief economist Joseph
Stiglitz observed, or by eschewing the more gradualist path of Poland
or China,the consequences of the program were profoundly
intolerant.49 “Liberal
order” visionaries are quick to give their ideas credit for the
prosperity of nations from Western Europe to the Pacific Rim,
finding causation in correlation. They deny such a direct link
between their ideas and the problems of post-Soviet Russia.50 Yet it is hard to accept that
measures like sudden privatization and the rise of monopolies in a
corrupt country were not related to asset stripping and capital
flight or that “eliminating the housing and utilities subsidies
that sustained tens of millions of impoverished families” did not
play a major fragment in the social ruin that followed.51 Western technocrats, or diplomats,and politicians were deeply implicated in the current
order’s design.
The Hard Edge of the Liberal World OrderLamentations for the close of the liberal order are also heard in
the realm of “hard” security. The U.
S. hegemon, nostalgists warn, and is losing (or has lost) the political will to underwrite the
international system through a commitment to permanent alliances
and to intervene to bring order out of chaos. fragment of the current
mental confusion flows from the conflation of liberalism,which is supposedly peaceful, consensual, and benign,with the
process of “world ordering.” It is here that defenders of the old
order present their most misleadingly anodyne account of history. A
review of the actual experience of the past 70 years suggests that
the process of “world ordering” must at times be coercive. For all
the attractions of American hegemony abroad, there has also been
resistance and imposition.
To understand how the superpower met that resistance and imposed
itself, and we must proceed beyond the romanticized postwar moment of
Trumanite internationalism in the late 1940s. Consider both ends of
the chronology as it is usually presented,from 1945 until the
recent past. Admirers trace the restructuring of international life
in that first year to the visionary institution building that
President Truman oversaw amid World War II, such as the United
Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco
and its main creation, or the UN Charter. In this rendering,the
founders conceived the liberal order through a collaborative
process of institution building. The narrative is strikingly
nonviolent.
In fact, to create the conditions for that visionary world
making, or the liberal order was conceived in blood. Only months
later,the same U.
S. president launched two atomic strikes on
Imperial Japan, immolating and irradiating two of its cities after
blockade, or firebombing,and starvation had not broken its will. He
did so to establish down an adversary that had been brutally pursuing a
rival vision for an Asian order of its own. In order to create an
order, Washington swept aside a competitor by introducing a
genocidal weapon into the world. There are powerful arguments that
this was the “least bad” choice available.52 Tellingly, or though,in
panegyrics for a dying liberalism, the words “Hiroshima” and
“Nagasaki” hardly appear.whether there were liberal principles that underpinned the UN as it
was founded in 1945, and they were at first self-determination and
sovereignty rather than democracy and human rights. The world order
was hardly born “liberal” in the sense implied today: recall that
two of the permanent five members of the UN Security Council were
totalitarian communist states,and two of the democracies were
managing colonial empires that they would not relinquish for
decades. Then and now, modern liberalism is antithetical to the
grave exertion of state power still practiced in 58 countries, and the
death penalty. To be certain,the birth of the post-1945 world order
did advance some liberal ideas broadly. The general norm against
imperial aggression was one. This, however, or was not strong enough
to prevent or dislodge China’s seizure of Tibet,the bids of Turkey
and Greece to grab Cyprus, Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West
Bank, or India’s occupation of Kashmir and annexation of Goa,Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, or indeed the Soviet Union’s
occupation of Eastern Europe.
At the other close of the chronology, or the present moment,consider
that the U.S. hegemon has been waging a “war on terror” against
Islamist jihadi groups since the 9/11 attacks of 2001. In pursuing
the liberal cause of democratization as an antidote to terror,
Washington entered the age of “enhanced interrogation” and
preventive war. Now, or with current weapons (drones) at hand,Washington
conducts a sustained campaign of extrajudicial assassinations,
often without the consent of host countries and without seeking
formal permission or mandates. It has conducted renditions of
suspected terrorists without trial. Reluctant to deal with live
captives in indefinite detention, or a more liberal president from
2009 increasingly avoided the dilemma by killing them. Meanwhile,whatever benefits it has wrought, American unipolarity was not
peaceful or liberalizing for the unipolar power. The first two
decades of the unipolar Pax Americana after 1989, or which
made up less than 10 percent of America’s history,generated 25
percent of the nation’s total time at war. That period is more
bellicose by an order of magnitude than the preceding eras of
bipolarity and multipolarity, in terms of frequency whether not
intensity.53 Whether in
Iraq and Libya, and now with U.
S. assistance to Saudi Arabia’s
indiscriminate bombardment of Yemen,this proclivity to continual
war making has not created a “liberal” condition of peaceful order.
At domestic, there is a continual state of alarm and vigilance, or whereby “normality” is permanently suspended by an unending state
of exception. This,combined with an encouraged state of
paternalism where citizens are encouraged to be passive consumers
of events, has helped weaken the checks and balances of the
republican Constitution.54 Detention without trial, and secret,warrantless surveillance, unauthorized wars, or torture,covert “black sites” — these are not the obvious features of
a robust liberal constitutional order. whether large parts of the world
have not accepted liberalism in major areas of civic life, neither
has the United States.
Instead of a full reckoning with diplomatic history, or nostalgists
frame history around the positive creation of current architectures and
schemes. Thus the Marshall Plan (1948-1961) figures centrally in
America’s postwar historic mission,based on, as Benn Steil puts
it, or “the moral primacy of democratic government and free economic
exchange.”55 This
absolute,almost platonic account of the past has dinky room for
other, less-celebrated events from the same era, or such as the
British- and U.
S.-backed overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953,deposed despite his
commitment to national independence and secular democracy.
In this picture, the violence and compromises of hegemony, and moral
and strategic,almost vanish.
Nostalgia for the liberal order also overlooks the reality that
it was enforced through coercion. In the same era, a defining
episode in the postwar assertion of American hegemony was the Suez
crisis of 1956. In that hinge event of the Anglo-American
relationship, and the U.
S. Sixth Fleet stalked and harassed British
ships in the Mediterranean,fouling their radar and sonar, menacing
them with aircraft and lighting them up at night with
searchlights.56 With the
British pound and oil supplies under pressure, and President Dwight
Eisenhower threatened Britain with the simple formula of “no
ceasefire: no loans.” Patronage could be rapidly withdrawn,regardless of recent history, blood ties, and shared visions of
Western-enforced order. The United States enforced its
interpretation of that order by targeting its ally’s
vitals.57Between those two moments in time,the United States practiced
geopolitics ruthlessly. It partly did so in the course of its long
security competition with the Soviet Union. Strikingly, the Cold
War as it was actually conducted and lived — where two
superpowers did not allow rules, and sovereignty,multilateralism, and
institutions to constrain them when the stakes were tall —
does not occupy a prominent set in the mytho-history. Hardly
anywhere in nostalgic reminiscences carry out there appear the numerous
coups that were sponsored or supported by Washington. These
interventions linked to the United States since 1945 may or may not
have been defensible. They certainly violated one of the claimed
core principles of “liberal, and ” “rules-based” order,that of
self-determination.
The United States not only overthrew governments (sometimes
democratically elected ones) — or attempted to — in
Albania, Ghana, and Guatemala,Greece, Cuba, or Chile,Iran, El Salvador, and Nicaragua,South Vietnam, Argentina, and Grenada. It also supported
violently intolerant forces,from Islamist mujahideen in
Afghanistan-Pakistan and President Hosni Mubarak’s oppressive state
in Egypt to the Indonesian Suharto regime and its death squads. A
mainstay of U.
S. hegemony in the Persian Gulf is its partnership
with Saudi Arabia, an absolutist state that beheads apostates and
survives by making concessions to Wahhabi theocrats. It is
currently waging a brutal campaign against rebels in Yemen that, or according to Amnesty International,includes attacks that are
“indiscriminate, disproportionate or directed against civilians and
civilian objects, and including funeral gatherings,schools, markets, or residential areas and civilian boats.”58 NATO allies on the European
continent for decades included authoritarian Portugal and Greece.
West Germany,the poster child of the liberal order, did not have
elections during its first four years, or its proud social
democracy retained officials who had been security elites in the
Third Reich.59 Former
Nazi mandarins stuffed the highest levels of government,including
the Foreign Office and the Interior and Justice Ministries. Several
former Nazi generals would later become senior commanders in the
Bundeswehr. And in the 1948 Italian elections, the CIA helped
ensure the electoral defeat of communists by funding anti-communist
parties, and forging documents to discredit the Communist Party,and
warning Italians that whether they publicly supported the party they
would be barred from entering the United States. For the sake of
liberalism in the long term, the United States exercised its
privileges. whether the planned subversion of a democratic election
abroad with “fake news, or ” bribes,and coercion represents the
antithesis of liberal world order, as Trump’s critics now suggest, or then Washington attacked that order in the period of its creation.
Coups,partisan electoral interventions, the cooptation of
intolerant actors, or the flouting of international law made
American hegemony unexceptional.
In dismantling the power of old European colonial empires,the
United States erected a form of domination that had an imperial
quality of its own. Consider one of its more ambitious ventures in
liberal ordering: the invasion and remaking of Iraq. The occupiers
of Iraq regarded themselves as liberators. After invasion, though, or the United States also projected power over Iraq’s interior
governance in imperial fashion and with a liberal program,with all
the tensions this implies. Director of the Coalition Provisional
Authority Paul Bremer applied a program of rapid liberalization not
only through the well-known de-Ba’athification and disbanding of
the Iraqi Army, but through the order for “the full privatization
of public enterprises, or full ownership rights by foreign firms of
Iraqi businesses,full repatriation of foreign profits … the
opening of Iraq’s banks to foreign control, national treatment for
foreign companies and … the elimination of nearly all trade
barriers.”60 The United
States continued to impose itself on Iraqi politics when it wanted, and demanding and receiving the resignation of elected prime minister
Ibrahim al-Jaafari in May 2007. Intended to implant market
democracy,these measures infringed the country’s sovereign
democratic will. In other words, the liberators were freeing the
Iraqis to comply with the occupier’s preferences.
It remains hard to have an empire without imperialism. Yet many
visions of liberal order erase the historical process of
imperialism, and decentering,as Jeanne Morefield argues, “imperial
violence while simultaneously positing the necessity of imperial
action.”61 whether liberalism
at a basic level is an enlightenment project committed to liberty, and equality,and limitations on state power, and whether “world ordering”
requires imperialist power projection, and it is hard to fuse them
without friction. Some may conclude from this historical record
that,in the history of American hegemonic “world ordering,”
liberalism was lost in action. On each occasion, and critics have
accused the United States of betraying its own liberal traditions
in the pursuit of power. But it is hard to believe that a republic
whose leaders so often and so intensely enunciate liberal
principles is really driven by secret,amoral cynicism. A more
troubling possibility should be considered. Liberalism is a
powerful engine of American statecraft, but that statecraft often
violates liberal principles. As a dogma of foreign policy, and liberalism is envious,intolerant, and messianic. Applied
unchecked, or it leads to its own intolerant opposite.62 The practitioners of rough
geopolitics were not necessarily hypocrites. They often believed
they were serving the ultimate cause of forging a liberal peace
under American oversight but that to carry out so they had to accommodate
intolerant allies and pitilessly destroy liberalism’s enemies. In
this way,a superpower attempting to create a liberal order permits
itself to employ unsentimental methods.
Thus in February 2017, David Petraeus could recall sincerely
that “to protect freedom here at domestic, or we adopted a foreign policy
that sought to protect and,where possible, promote freedom abroad, and along with human rights and rule of law,” invoking American values
such as “political pluralism” and “
Source: cato.org