Historian Steven Shapin begins his book The Scientific Revolution with the words: “The Scientific Revolution never happened. This is a book about it.” It would be tempting to say the same about the “liberal international order” (LMO), that it “doesn’t exist and hundreds of books have already been written about it.” This column now joins the chorus.
But the scientific revolution happened. And since the end of World War II, there has been a global framework that has contributed to the orderliness of international relations. The question is whether that framework can be described as “liberal” and whether it embodies what LMP proponents claim it is—“an open world connected by the free flow of people, goods, ideas, and capital,” which is, in the words of Antony Blinken, the outgoing US Secretary of State, “America’s greatest contribution to global peace and prosperity.”
The return of Donald Trump to the White House, with his “America First” policy and his disdain for international organizations and treaties, has revived fears for the survival of the LMP. “For the first time since the 30s,” warned leading liberal internationalist G. John Ikenberry in 20, after the first year of Trump’s first term, “the United States has elected a president who is actively hostile to liberal internationalism.” As a result, America can no longer provide the “hegemonic leadership” needed to “encourage cooperation and promote the values of the ‘free world.’”
Trump's bombastic statements about using force to assert US sovereignty over Greenland and the Panama Canal, his reluctance to continue arming Ukraine, his admiration for Vladimir Putin, and his disdain for international treaties deepen such fears ahead of his second term (the text was published on January 19, 1 - ed.).
Part of the problem in trying to understand this debate, and the fears that come with it, is that the LMP is a slippery and vaguely described beast that is understood in many different ways and constantly changes form. For people like Blinken, who sing its praises, the roots of this order go back to the end of World War II and the adoption of a series of multilateral treaties and institutions, from NATO to the World Bank, that were intended to bind disparate states together and prevent another global conflict.
But no one at the time spoke of “liberal internationalism.” The new institutions and treaties were established primarily to consolidate the power of the United States on one side of the Cold War divide, to contain Soviet expansion, and to support the transition from a world of imperial powers to a world of sovereign states under the tutelage of an American “hegemon.” As Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis observed: “Without any particular plan… the states of the postwar era were fortunate to end up in a system of international relations that, being based on the reality of power relations, served the purpose of maintaining order—if not fairness—even better than might have been expected.”
It was not until the 70s and 80s, with the trauma of America’s defeat in Vietnam, argues historian Samuel Moyn, that the concept gained wider support, and “liberal internationalism took its present form, with its emphasis on rules and rights.” Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and what Francis Fukuyama described as “the end of history”—the apparent triumph of liberal democracy. The idea of a “liberal international order” entered its golden age.
But it was a moment rather than an epoch. The triumphalism was short-lived, and after September 11, 2001, most Western leaders agreed that defending the liberal order allowed the use of extremely illiberal means, from kidnapping and torture to assassination and invasion. Less than a decade later, the financial collapse of 2008 and the rise of China on the global stage brought dismal warnings of “the end of the liberal order that never was,” as the political scientist Michael N. Barnett cynically put it.
The history of the LMP is marked by the intertwining of economics and geopolitics. On both tracks, the desire for a stable order took precedence over faith in “liberalism.” The economic goal was to make the world a safe place for global free markets, not by implementing laissez-faire policies but, as historian Quinn Slobodian shows, by “building institutions… that would inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy” and by establishing “rules that define supranational bodies beyond the reach of any electorate.” It is a project of neoliberalism, born in the 30s through the work of economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and which came to prominence in the post-Cold War period through the institutions and mechanisms of the liberal international order.
The result is rising inequality, the decline of civil society, and a growing sense of resentment within segments of the electorate around the world at being deprived of their political voice. Trump, like other populist leaders, has successfully exploited the moment of backlash against “liberal elites.”
The success of figures like Trump, with their anti-globalization stances, has led many to celebrate the “end of neoliberalism.” Yet many of those who profited from the neoliberal order remain at the center of the Trump project; not just “techno brothers” like Elon Musk. The triumphalist globalism of the post-Cold War era may be gone, but many components of neoliberalism are now refracted through the prism of heightened nationalism.
The geopolitical aspects of the LMP are equally contradictory. Western leaders may have preached liberalism, democracy, and the rule of law, but from Chile to Congo, from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia, they have readily undermined all elements of that trinity and supported neoliberalism and authoritarianism whenever it suited their needs.
Supporters of the LMP claim that he was a defender of world peace. But this “peace” does not mean the absence of war, but only the prevention of direct conflict between great powers. According to the Tufts University Military Intervention Research Project, of the nearly 400 US military interventions abroad from 1776 to 2019, the majority took place after 1945, and a quarter after 1989.
Long before Trump’s grandiose “America First” proclamations, American leaders pursued what Monica Duffy Toft, who founded the Military Intervention Research Project, calls “kinetic diplomacy—diplomacy that uses armed force”; it was a “clear trend” in the 21st century, promoted by liberal internationalists like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, as well as many others.
There are certainly many reasons to be concerned about US policies in the coming period. But to oppose Trump, we do not need to idealize the past or praise a liberal order that never existed. First, we need to think about what we mean by internationalism in this age of heightened nationalism.
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net, translation: Đ. Tomić)
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