In Cormac McCarthy’s noir western novel, No Country for Old Men, an honourable sheriff sees brutal, lawless days fall on his county, seemingly out of nowhere. He seeks solace by imagining a lost era of chivalry. He recalls an era when lawmen didn’t bear arms, a world that never was. In the face of inexplicable evil, his dream gives him something to hold onto and affords him dignity. It also paralyses him, making him a hapless witness to the chaos. Substitute the violent frontier for the world and the sheriff for foreign policy traditionalists, and a similar reaction is now under way in our angry days. Aghast that the time is out of joint, with the rise of President Donald Trump, populist demagogues and dangerous authoritarian regimes abroad, a group of people lament a dying order and the passing of American primacy in the world. They look back to a nobler past. Like the sheriff, they sense an end time has arrived. And like the sheriff, their invocations of a lost era cannot restore it. Invoking an imagined past impoverishes history. And it damages our capacity to act effectively under a darkening sky.
This is a book about euphemisms. Euphemisms are nice-sounding words that enable us to talk about a thing while avoiding its brutal realities. In this time of tumult, a set of evasive and soothing images about the past has come together, to imagine a lost world, a so-called ‘liberal order’. Pleasant words, like ‘leadership’ and ‘rules-based international order’, abound as a dispute grows over international relations. That dispute concerns the most important questions: how did we get here? And what must we do? As I argue, the concept of liberal order is misleading, as is the dream of its restoration. ‘Ordering’ and the business of hegemony is rough work, even for the United States, the least bad hegemon. If we want to forge an alternative order to the vision of Trump, it cannot be built in a dream palace. Only by gazing at history’s darkness can we confront the choices of today.
‘Orders’ are hierarchies created by the strong, to keep the peace on their terms. There have been many orders: Roman, Byzantine, Imperial Chinese, Ottoman, Mughal, Spanish, French and British. They are often also imperial in their working. After all, most of history is a history of empire, a form of power that exercises final control over its subject societies. The great powers that do the ‘ordering’ remake the world partly through institutions and norms, and partly through the smack of coercion. Orders encourage a politeness of sorts, but a politeness that ultimately rests on the threat of force. When lesser powers forget this, the dominant states quickly remind them, as in 1956 when President Dwight Eisenhower threatened Britain with an economic crisis if it didn’t cease its military adventure over Suez. Supposedly, according to their creators, orders remake the world in ways that replace chaos with regularity, making international life more legible, peaceable and secure.1 As they order the world around them, hegemons articulate that order in elevated rhetorical terms that soften the realities of power. Euphemisms reflect the dominant power’s conceit that it is unique, serving only as the source of order, never disorder, and always for the common good. More predatory overlords, like Imperial Japan, gave their programmes of enslavement preposterous names, like the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’. The instinct to euphemize also infects the United States, the gentlest hegemon thus far: wars are ‘police action’, crushing revolts is ‘counterinsurgency’, propaganda is ‘information operations’ and torture is ‘enhanced interrogation’. Reflecting on order (imperium) in his own time, and the gap between form and substance, the Roman historian Tacitus put a speech in the mouth of a Caledonian king who said of Roman violence, ‘these things they misname order: they make a desolation and they call it peace’.2
To most of its admirers, America’s order, created around the end of the Second World War and now fading, was different because it was ‘liberal’, meaning that it was organized around freedom, consent and equality. To them, the ordering power was not an empire. It was a more benign ‘hegemon’, a word drawn from ancient Greek to mean ‘leader’. For the first time, according to this orthodoxy, the most powerful nation on earth forsook imperial aggrandizement, instead using enlightened measures to make a world safe for market democracy in which people could find emancipation. America possessed vast and unprecedented power, the hard instruments of wealth, intelligence, military force and an array of alliances. Despite being a new goliath, though, Washington bound itself into an international system of its own design, constraining its might and thereby winning authority. Unlike earlier orders, this was a truly international world system. It was founded primarily on rules. It opened up a once-closed world. It provided public goods like freedom of the seas, and stable monetary systems. Like all past hegemons, America regarded its settlement as not only legitimate, but sacred.3
An international class of security experts and policy practitioners believes that there was such a benign dispensation, and that it lasted seven decades. In common, they believe America and the world are best served through an enduring marriage of liberal principles and American primacy, or supremacy. To its admirers, this new design was imperfect but noble. It marked a system of peaceful ordering – of hegemony without empire – to which we might return. The only alternative, they fear, is regressive chaos.
The apparent fall of this system is all the more distressing to its defenders, given that the ruin seems to come primarily from within. Rather than being conquered by an external aggressor, America’s order self-destructs. Western citizens lose faith in the project and fall prey to false consciousness. Demagogues, aided by sinister foreign powers, whip them up into a backlash. As Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, warned: ‘The rules-based international order is being challenged … not by the usual suspects, but by its main architect and guarantor, the US.’4 Or, in the words of the idea’s principal theorist, G. John Ikenberry, it is as though the citizens of an unsubjugated Rome are tearing down their own city. An unsettling analogy for a supposedly non-imperial superpower.
We can speak of an American-led order. But a liberal one? We should be wary. For every order, including America’s, has a shadow. It is one of hypocrisy and the threat of force well beyond the bounds of liberal norms, be that threat brazen or quiet, astute or naive. Hegemons will have their prerogatives, whether this means insisting that others open their markets while protecting their own, demanding that their sovereignty be respected while conducting raids into others’ backyards, or denouncing election meddling while practising it. Not for nothing did Hedley Bull define order as ‘imperialism with good manners’.5
In all the yearnings for a restored order, and in the closeness of liberal ambition and empire, lies the ghost of President Woodrow Wilson (1913–21). Wilson, it will be recalled, sought to translate victory in the First World War into a new international order. He envisioned a world governed by laws and converging towards democracy, a ‘community of power’. But he, too, typified the tendency of hegemons to set rules for others and play by their own, the better to remain in the ascendancy. The new hegemon would supplant the old and exercise its prerogatives. ‘Let us build a bigger navy than hers’, he said of Britain in 1916, ‘and do what we please.’6 Like most great powers that boast of their mandate to bring peace to the world, Wilson made war often. Against weaker adversaries from Latin America and the Caribbean to post-Tsarist Russia, his commitment to enlarging liberty was imperial, even when he wasn’t aware of it. When he drafted a speech claiming ‘it shall not lie with the American people to dictate to another what their government shall be’, his secretary of state added in the margin: ‘Haiti, S Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama.’7 In this respect, America as a great power is unexceptional.
To be clear, the target here is not the minimal ‘baseline’ claim that an American-led order was better than the alternatives. It clearly was. It was better for the world that America became the dominant power, rather than its totalitarian competitors, even if the exercise of that dominance varied in its wisdom. As hegemonies go, America’s was the least bad by a decisive margin. It was a bulwark against twentieth-century totalitarianism; it won more than half the Nobel Laureate prizes, pioneered Jazz, helped rebuild Europe, invented the polio vaccine and took humanity to the moon. American hegemony was obviously less atrocious, and more constructive, than European colonial, Axis or communist empires. Some forget that America created this world through agonizing compromise. Its relative moral superiority, without power politics, cannot explain America’s rise. It cannot prevent its fall. And the belief in one’s indispensability can lead to the fall. Athenian primacy in the ancient Hellenic world was more open and free than Persian autocracy, but that did not prevent its selfdestruction. To confine ourselves to the comfort that, at least, the Pax Americana was better is like retelling the national story with frontier massacres and the Civil War left out.
Rather, the target is a more ambitious proposition, that America exercised hegemony without being imperial; that it oversaw a ‘world historical’ transformation in which rules about sovereignty, human rights and free trade reigned and defined the international system; that the USA voluntarily constrained itself in such a system; that the ‘good things’ that the order produced are attributable to liberal behaviour; and that the sources of the current crisis somehow lie outside the order. This version of liberal order is ahistorical about the nature of power relations in the world. It tells us little about how we got here. Wrong about the past, it is therefore a bad guide for the future.
Even America’s most glorious achievements – with liberal ‘ends’ – were not clean pluses on a balance sheet, made by liberal ‘means’. They relied on a preponderance of power, a preponderance that had brutal foundations. America’s most beneficial achievements were partly wrought by illiberal means, through dark deals, harsh coercion and wars gone wrong that killed millions. No account of US statecraft is adequate without its range of activity. Coups, carpet bombings, blockades and ‘black sites’ were not separate lapses, but were part of the coercive ways of world-ordering. Prosperity generated pollution on an epic scale. Even today, when the USA is keener to limit its liability and is more reluctant to wade ashore into hostile lands, it bombs countries with almost routine frequency. And central to its repertoire are economic sanctions, a polite term for crippling economic punishment, at times even siege and ‘maximum pressure’, inflicted on whole populations and often not with liberating effects. Possibly one-third of the ‘open’ world’s people live in countries under economic warfare of some kind.8
Conversely, the same America has a conscience. It has held genuinely liberal ideals. Such ideals are a pillar of the American diplomatic mind. For most of those close to power who hold these ideals, this is not a case of ulterior motives, or dressing up narrow material interest in the cloak of universal justice. They are driven by a deeply rooted belief in America’s singular duty to lead the world. But too often, sincerely held ideals had inadvertent and illiberal consequences. In this century, when external restraints were weak and a sense of power and ambition grew, the USA intensified its pursuit of armed supremacy, confident it could see further, and stepped up its effort to spread a system of ever more adventurous global capitalism. From the almost-forgotten capitalist shock therapy visited on post-Soviet Russia, to wars to remake the Greater Middle East, to the loosening of the global financial system, or the incitement of democratic revolution abroad, efforts to spread liberal light have provoked history’s wrath. The very attitude built into the nostalgia, the assurance that one’s international role is vital, that one’s actions are the source of stability and peace, that the dangers of inaction are the only ones worth worrying about, helped lead to disaster, whether in Wall Street, Moscow or Baghdad. To rewrite this history as an ‘arc’ of progress, or an ‘arc’ of anything, is to repeat the hubris that got us here. The arc of history bends toward delusion.9
There is a poverty in the righteous storytelling that underpins the liberal order idea. The main move of nostalgia is to lament the order’s fall, or call for its revival, while sparing the order any blame for its own plight. Somehow, while it was powerful enough to transform modern life, the Pax Americana remains innocent of its own undoing. It was the fault of other actors, or of leaders who didn’t believe in it enough, or the masses who failed to keep the faith. Its error is to suppose that American power and its liberalism was not only good, but essentially good, that good and wise things are ‘who we are’, while destructive excess is an aberration, and failure must be due to something else. Nostalgia gives the lost order an alibi as wicked populists and a set of ‘isms’ – populism, authoritarianism, protectionism, racism – are to blame. It is also reductionist about the present, offering false binary choices like internationalism versus isolationism, leadership versus quitting, global domination versus isolation in a post-American world. This damages our ability to adapt today under constraints, when prudent statecraft will require some mix of power-projection and retrenchment.
These conceits have come together in the figure of former Vice-President, and presidential candidate, Joseph Biden. ‘This too shall pass’, he declared at the Munich security conference in February 2019, prompting a standing ovation.10 The applause echoed ‘a longing to return to a world order that existed before President Donald Trump starting swinging his wrecking ball’.11 Biden presents Trump as a passing aberration: ‘America is coming back like we used to be. Ethical, straight, telling the truth … supporting our allies. All those good things.’12 ‘Good things’ suggests a cleansing of history. It holds out an assurance that Trump, and the revolt, are exogenous to the order, and thus can be swiftly hurled back into the night without an inquest. Keep the faith, it urges, and await the return of the sleeping king. This attitude is reflected in the Democratic Party more widely, where there is little contest over fresh ideas about foreign policy, and where electability overshadows questions of substance. What if Biden is wrong? What if the order itself was flawed, and drove these revolts? What if the political crisis cannot be undone by one ballot?
Not only did a liberal order never truly exist. Such an order cannot exist. Neither the USA nor any power in history has risen to dominance by being ethical, straight or truthful, or by supporting allies, not without a panoply of darker materials. To suggest otherwise covers over a bloodier, more conflicted and more imperial history, of a superpower driven both by ruthless power-seeking and messianic zeal, in a world shaped also by resistance. The hegemon imposed, stretched or ignored rules, built and bypassed institutions. By turns it coerced, cajoled and abandoned allies, to remain in the ascendancy. When overblown notions of its world-historical mission took hold, it led to unexpected chaos and unanticipated pushback, and damaged liberal values at home. At times, it was simply defeated. Euphemistic memory does not deny this history. It just refuses to linger on it. It loses sight of how our world was, and is, ordered – indeed, what ‘ordering’ involves, deflecting attention from its hard dilemmas.
If you share these doubts, read on. If you are a believer and are already irked, let me try to persuade you, in the spirit of liberal toleration.
Sudden and distressing changes have rocked the international system since the early 2010s. Hostile revisionist states are on the move, ranging from Russia’s seizure of Crimea and its covert campaigns of subversion and terror; China’s domestic repression, its expansion in the South China Sea, its bullying of foreign populations and its threats to Taiwan; and North Korea’s acquisition of a deliverable nuclear weapon. There has been sectarian bloodletting in the Middle East, mixing war with humanitarian crisis and the flight of refugees, and intensifying security competition. Only recently, the black flags of the Islamic State flew above Mosul. There are the agonies of the Arab Spring revolutions, which lurched into despotic reaction in some countries, state implosion in others. Economic protectionism is again on the rise. Crisis also rises within, in the fallout over Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU), nationalist populist movements in Europe, Asia and Latin America, and the coming of authoritarian ‘strongmen’. In particular, political tumult and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency have driven anxious commentators to lament the collapse of a post-1945 universe of institution-building, rule-following and enlightened leadership. Growing discord makes more faceless but tangible terrors, like the climate crisis, even more daunting.
These disturbances draw a widening cast of transatlantic security officials, experts, scholars, politicians, military officers, mandarins, plutocrats and public intellectuals to offer nostalgic visions of the past, and to speak of a political end time.13 They either warn that the survival of a rules-based liberal world order is at stake, or they write its obituary. We are witnessing the ‘end of the West as we know it’, the abandonment of ‘global leadership’ by its ‘long-time champion’, and a ‘Coming Dark Age’. Foreign Affairs, the house organ of the foreign policy establishment, recently asked thirty-two experts ‘Is the Liberal Order in Peril?’. Twenty-six agreed, confidently, that it is.14
The new disorder attracts grand claims. At the 2019 Munich Security Conference, former leaders issued a Declaration of Principles that underpinned the post-war order: ‘democracy; free, fair, and open markets; and the rule of law’.15 With a stroke of the pen, history’s darkness is banished and a world of discrepant experiences is wished away, from the killing fields of the Cold War, to the centres of authoritarian power, to the long history of post-war mercantilism. This is history at high altitude. From a similar height come the manifestos of the World Economic Forum at the Swiss ski resort at Davos and its ahistorical ‘exhortatory slogans’.16 The funeral of US Senator John McCain in September 2018, which was likened to a ‘Resistance meeting’, called forth praise for the cause of armed liberalism, and lamentations for the order’s passing, with McCain’s death marking its recessional hymn.17 A large literature has formed, praising the liberal order. With honourable exceptions, the liberal order version of the past is a panegyric, a speech of praise. With their ideals under strain, proponents of these views circle their wagons and tend towards a sectarian style. They celebrate orthodoxies – free trade, expanding alliances, order-enforcing military action, American global leadership – and denounce heresies, such as protectionism, military restraint, non-intervention and détente with enemies.
If the heart of liberalism is the promise of liberation from tyranny, then the panegyrics suggest that Washington achieved security in an enlightened way by reshaping the world – or large parts of it – in its liberal image. America’s domestic norms flowed outwards, reproducing in the world the socioeconomic order that prevails at home.18 Because of this liberal character, the victorious superpower exercised not mere power, but global leadership and deep engagement, creating peace-promoting institutions. America underwrote the system with its unprecedented power, while also subordinating itself to it. Instead of power untamed, the new order was based, above all, on rules and regularity. The Pax Americana repudiated the old statecraft that had culminated in total war and genocide, in imperial domination and cut-throat geopolitics, land grabs and spheres of influence, protectionist tariff blocs and economic autarky, and zero-sum, violent nationalism. Unlike the brute dominance of empire and its rule by command, it was American hegemony that allegedly presided, a type of power based more on rule by consent and legitimate authority, providing public goods and ‘flexibly enforced rules’.19 As first citizen among nations, America both subordinated itself to rules, structures and protocols, yet was also a new Leviathan, restraining itself and, by doing so, acquiring authority. The new order was imperfect, its admirers agree. Its institutions need reinventing. Still, it created unprecedented relative prosperity and prevented major wars. It is a world, they believe, worth fighting for, as the jungle grows back.20
These sentiments are also voiced by the professoriate. A July 2018 manifesto against Trump, an advertisement paid for by forty-three professors of International Relations in the New York Times,21 resulted in an online petition signed by hundreds of eminences of the discipline.22 More measured than other panegyrics, even this statement treats its claims as self-evident truths, advanced by appeals to authority, and offering a sanitized historical picture of the USA as dutiful global citizen, deferring to the institutions it created.
The thrust of these claims is that the world can again be ordered in the enlightened design of a global system, run for the common good by a far-sighted superpower that legitimizes its order by willingly constraining itself. Liberal order visionaries counsel Washington to restore a battered tradition, to uphold economic and security commitments, and to promote liberal values. To interpret recent disappointments as a reason for revising orthodox positions, they warn, is an overreaction. The literature explains in detail why various actors from Trump to Putin pose threats. Yet it is also notable for its presumptuousness about its referent object. The rules-based system, assumed a priori as a real thing worth defending, for instance, by Britain’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee, is the axiomatic historical starting point.23
The rhetoric has become an incantation. It is all the more striking for being relatively recent, a new vocabulary for what is supposed to be a single unbroken project pursued by the Atlantic West for generations. ‘The less the actual liberal international order resembled the conditions of its early zenith’, one observer notes, ‘the greater became the need to name it.’24 The worse international conditions get, the more the incantations repeat, as though repeating them will somehow sing a lost world back into life. The UK’s National Security Strategy of 2015, written in the glare of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Islamic State’s eruption in the Middle East, repeated the phrase ‘rules-based order’ thirty times, Australia’s Defence White Paper of 2016 thirty-eight times.
Thus far, constant reaffirmation is not faring well. It is not easing the present disorder, nor converting alienated voters, nor dampening the ambitions of America’s rivals. Cross-sections of voters report that the notion of liberal order baffles and underwhelms them, while the majority of veterans agree with the majority of the general public that America’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria were wasteful.25 For those in the audience with doubts, it feels more like being ‘preached at’ than being informed.26
The claim that America’s order was exceptional, and the hegemony/ empire distinction, echoes the exceptionalist claims of previous great powers. It is an old conceit. It dates back at least to nineteenth-century Britain, another time of dispute over the relation between liberalism and empire. The Victorian historian and banker George Grote projected the same fantasy, of non-imperial hegemony, onto classical Greece, distinguishing Athens’s benign leadership of a coalition from oppressive Persian overlordship. The Greeks, however, used the terms ‘hegemony’ and ‘empire’ interchangeably.27 They had a point. For even between ‘friends’ in the international arena, interests eventually diverge. When they do, even benign stronger powers have a habit of bringing their strength to bear.
Euphemizing the exercise of power, this worldview should not survive interrogation. It simply leaves out too much contrary history. It over-privileges the peaceful centres of the American order – Western Europe and East Asia – when the order defined itself also in the zones where power was most contested. It fails to account for the most consequential event in post-war American public life, the Vietnam War. Like all hegemons, Washington for long periods loosened its restraint, exerting itself violently to save face, project credibility and sustain authority, and ignored rules as it suited.
Yet talk of liberal order proliferates. It has become the lingua franca of the Atlantic security class. Such is the consistency and unity of their language, and so close is their social network through conclaves in Aspen, Davos, Munich, Harvard, the Brookings Institute or the Council on Foreign Relations, and the revolving door between think-tanks, government, foundations, universities and media commentary, that the coalition of those who call for a return to a liberal order can be regarded as a class in itself, with its own dialect.28
In our age of complex realignment, the question of order also cuts diagonally across old lines, creating new coalitions. Hawkish internationalist Republicans and Democrats make common cause against Trump and the order’s enemies.29 Neoconservatives, committed to heroic greatness, subdivide on the question of liberalism, some enlisting in bipartisan resistance against Trump, others joining his administration.30 The question even divides the Trumpists. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared the pursuit of a new liberal order based on the principle of national sovereignty, after which there emerged a starker conception of primacy, defined as ‘We’re America, Bitch’.31 A group of the president’s ministers, who chafe at some elements of the liberal order – for example, adherence to institutions – have tried to tilt their erratic boss back into the orthodoxy of US hegemonic leadership. This is not a simple story.
Advocates of the ‘liberal order’ believe it was a good thing, and worth defending.32 It was, they argue, a constellation of ‘bargains, institutions and social purposes’33 created under the leadership of the post-war USA. As the dominant state, with its favourable geography, economic and demographic size and military preponderance, America shaped ‘the rules of the game by which international politics is played, the intellectual frameworks employed by many states, and the standards by which behaviour is judged to be legitimate’.34 For admirers, this was a profound project that rewired the world. They periodize it as a more-or-less continuous set of arrangements that lasted for more than seventy years from the Allied victory in 1945. America created a constitutional order as opposed to unchecked power, a system that was fundamentally consensual, benign and open. The order’s longevity, stability and attraction rested on these liberal ideological foundations. This system constituted a harmony of interests, in that it was both good for America and good for the world.
Traditionalists share a vocabulary, historical reference points and logic, though what they mean precisely by ‘order’ varies. Some use the term loosely as a proxy for the general benevolence of American primacy. Others make more specific and ambitious claims about how that world once worked. All defend liberal order as a historical creation that rescued a world from depression, totalitarianism, world war and genocide. Most propose it as a model for the future, if only others would share their vision. Their pessimism varies. Some argue that the order is collapsing with America’s ‘retreat’ and the rise of barbaric forces at home and abroad, and that the best we can do is salvage what we can. Others hope that even as an internal schism divides the West, the order created by America can outlive its principal architect.
In opposition, there are sceptics.35 Most of these argue that liberal order is a false promise, a master concept that will do more to hinder than to help us pick our way through the chaos. They note the gap between nostalgia and history, and that the post-war world was never ‘whole’. There may be ‘islands of liberal order, but they are floating in a sea of something quite different’.36 Most favour a more restrained grand strategy – less militarized, more accommodating, less driven to expansion. Some are isolationists, favouring bringing America home from its overseas commitments. Many are not – including this author. In their shared opposition to centrist orthodoxy, sceptics derive from a mixed and overlapping grouping of academic realists, anti-war conservatives and progressive-leftist internationalists, though there is also a group of primacists who maintain that the USA should still pursue dominance abroad but without extravagant projects to export democratic capitalism. In common, they challenge visions of liberal order as a once-achieved fact to which we can return. Such memories are ahistorical, and therefore no answer to the present predicament. Indeed, they are part of the problem. As a ‘mytho-history’ that provides an account of origin and a guide to action, the false memory of liberal order obscures what power politics involves. And it turns attention away from where it can lead, especially when the powerful inhale their own mythology. The task should not be to adapt, reform, refresh, repackage or rebrand this vision. That vision put the USA where it is now: saddled by unsustainable debt, stifled by excessive and unaccountable state power, struggling through multiple failed wars, on collision course with rivals in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, and helmed by Trump. The prudent response is instead to correct, or at least restrain, its flaws.
Beyond that baseline argument, sceptics are a more heterogenous lot. They disagree with one another about whether there really was a liberal order or whether there can be. Some argue there was, at least once the USA become the unipolar primate and, unfettered, ran amok. Others celebrate liberal progress but claim that American hegemony had little to do with it. Still others complain that there ought to have been such an order, but it was absent. They call on Washington to practise what it preaches and obey the rules it insists others obey, suggesting that we could have such an order if only the hypocrisy were to end.37 Thus there are unresolved arguments within the sceptics’ camp about whether liberal order is desirable or possible.
Ideas about order matter and have weighty policy implications. Just as material power enables or forecloses certain choices, so ideas condition and constrain a country’s grand strategic decisions. Those who lament the fall of the liberal order are saying, in effect, that some ideas are illegitimate and should be off the table. They worry that populism and isolationism endanger traditional ideas that were once dominant, leading America to abandon its manifold commitments overseas. When they call for the reclamation of the old order, they also call for the perpetuation of American primacy. By contrast, I argue that the exaggerated notion of the liberal order and its imminent collapse is one of the myths of empire that helped create the current crisis.
Today’s politics is restoration politics, the politics of promising to resuscitate lost orders. Strongmen, demagogic populists, seek authority by claiming to speak for the true virtuous people against illegitimate alien elites, vowing to bring lost orders back. They will ‘make America great again’, ‘take back control’, or return jobs, industries, sovereign borders and national pride.38 And they are not the only ones to harken back. Proponents of liberal order see their cause as forward-looking and scold voters and political realists alike for being backward-looking.39 Yet they too traffic in nostalgia. In George Packer’s elegy for the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke, a curator of the Pax Americana, his hero weeps at the 1949 musical South Pacific for the loss of a ‘feeling that we could do anything’, an era ‘when we had gone to the most distant corners of the globe and saved civilization’.40 Cautioning against being ‘backward-looking’, such minds also call for the revival of a system that was founded in atypical and impermanent conditions seventy years ago, under a different distribution of power, an exceptionalism based on America’s technocratic capacity ‘to innovate and solve hard problems’.41 Former Senator, Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton accused Trump voters of ‘looking backward’. But she too appealed to a romanticized past, a ‘long-standing bipartisan tradition of global leadership rooted in a preference for cooperating over acting unilaterally, for exhausting diplomacy before making war, and for converting old adversaries into allies rather than making new enemies’.42 The history Clinton praises was far more mixed. Historically, the USA often acted unilaterally, waged preventive war – and considered doing so – before exhausting all options, including in Iraq in 2003 with Clinton’s supporting vote, and sustained enmities from Cuba’s Fidel Castro to the Iranian Ayatollahs.43
At times, self-identified liberal traditionalists are risibly nostalgic. The writings of hawkish public intellectual Max Boot exhibit the nostalgia’s imperial turn. Boot champions ‘liberal order’, scolding fellow Republicans that ‘nostalgia isn’t a foreign policy’. Yet he also advises Washington to find wartime inspiration in historical campaigns to pacify frontiers, borrowing his title from Rudyard Kipling’s poem urging America to take up the ‘white man’s burden’.44 Boot’s explicit reverence for empire and its thirst for vengeance, his insensitivity to the genocidal and racial character of his subject, is an extreme case. It also reveals an awkward truth, often only in the margins of other accounts. Namely, that this is a history not simply of benign leaders and the grateful led. It is a history of resistance and imposition, of punitive force. Frequent violence at the hegemon’s discretion, to tame the world into order, is central to the history.
Many believers in liberal order do not share Boot’s enthusiasm for bloody frontiers. They think of themselves as peaceable and law-abiding. When they advocate for force, they believe they are creating a better state of peace. Yet in practice, they exhibit the liberal order’s proclivity to militarism of a kind. Our post-war order, embodied in the United Nations, was originally founded more to limit the use of force in principle – ‘the scourge of war’ – than to license it. As good Atlanticists, though, enthusiasts for liberal order often advocate military exertion under US leadership, and often without formal authorization from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), to enforce some rules, effectively, by violating others, and in ways they probably would not condone from other states. In August 2013, the liberal Economist denounced the British parliament for voting down air strikes on Syria to punish a chemical weapons (CW) atrocity, a bombing that was urgently needed to enforce a taboo and uphold a rules-based international order.45 Opponents of war, who worried that ill-conceived military action breached rules or due process, and could inadvertently assist Islamist rebels, were branded as insular reactionaries. The assertion that, in the established order, a CW taboo is supreme and must override other considerations is ahistorical, as suggested by Washington’s earlier record in sponsoring a CW-armed Iraq against Iran. Once again, liberal consciences were persuaded that airstrikes should be used as a tool of affordable moral action, denouncing sceptics for their backwardness. Once again, they claimed a special prerogative and disregarded alternative conceptions of order. Once again, liberalism was not very liberal.
The debate over international order is difficult to have in a productive way. The issue mixes up fraught concepts: the question of liberalism, a rich and conflicted tradition; the question of the ‘international’ and how American power should shape it; and conflicting ideas of ‘order’. Liberal order is a moving target. Often it expresses not a falsifiable hypothesis but an article of faith, aspirations about American internationalism that confuse means and ends. As Damon Linker notes, the concept gets caught between two contrary views:
The liberal international order that encourages rule-following and negotiation while fostering peace and prosperity among nations is our handiwork, as is the democratic world we have nurtured around the globe. Those who oppose us in defending this order are evildoers … and we’ll seek to demonstrate this by pointing to every bad thing they’ve ever done as evidence of their inherent treachery and malevolence. We’re idealists, in other words. Moral, well-meaning, law-abiding, leading by principle and example in everything we do.
But that’s only one half of the equation. America might be unwaveringly moral, but we are also tough, ruthless, hard-nosed, realistic about the ugly ways of the world, like a sheriff toiling to establish a modest and vulnerable zone of order in a lawless land. In such a world, the ends often justify the means. When fighting our enemies, we need to be willing to do whatever it takes to prevail. We have no choice … unlike the bad guys, whose every unsavoury deed deserves to be treated as an exemplification of their wickedness, our seemingly malicious actions appear to be rare exceptions, wholly excused by the lamentable necessities that govern a fallen world.46
Precisely because of the unswerving belief in the order’s decency and soundness, panegyrics offer shallow accounts of the crisis. They serve up glutinous reassurances, that the order has all the answers to its own problems, that what is ‘wrong’ with the order can be fixed with what is ‘right’ with it.47 The order’s defenders offer technocratic remedies: refined institutions, fresh messaging or creative new programmes. If the order is perishing, it cannot be due to its own internal flaws. It is being assassinated, after being made vulnerable through neglect. This dictates unpromising responses, whether to write the order’s obituary, blame ‘defeatists’, or preach for its revival in the hope that the disillusioned will return to its banner. If the world is changing as profoundly as nostalgists believe, we need inquest, not exoneration.
The target here is the proposition of liberal order. This is not the same as liberalism, a rich tradition that is continually remade. Liberal order is a suggestion about how a dominant power organized, and can organize, the world. I argue that the concept is a self-contradiction. The world is too dangerous and conflicted to be ordered liberally, and overstriving to spread democracy abroad will destroy it at home.As the historical record shows, as well as consensual institution-building and dialogue, there were illiberal and coercive parts. These dark parts – the hypocrisies of power – were not aberrations but helped constitute the system. The order was partly driven by an imperial logic, of hierarchical dominance, partly an anarchic logic of competition for security, as well as recurring liberal impulses.48 It was mercantilist as well as ‘free’. It rested on privilege more than on rules. Appeals to the myth of a liberal Camelot flow from a deeper myth, of power politics without coercion, and empire without imperialism.
These problems are rooted primarily not in American political culture, but in the tragic nature of international life. In an inherently insecure world, to order is an illiberal process, and a violent and coercive one, that invariably forces compromises between liberal values and brutal power politics. Even the most high-minded overseas projects require collaboration with illiberal forces, whether dictators, fanatics or criminals. Even the episode most fondly recalled in transatlantic memory as an unambiguous good, the defeat of the Axis in the Second World War, was made possible through an appeasement of Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Ordering is an inherently imperial undertaking. By ‘imperial’, I mean the exercise of dominance over another state’s domestic policies, whether in the foreground or implicitly in the background. American statecraft reflects both the desire to liberate and yet also to control, a ‘Crusader State’, setting others free while determining their course, on American terms.49 This need not be formal or annexationist rule. In this case, it is a distinctively American, informal mode of empire, one that functions as
influence, exercised routinely and consistently, becomes indistinguishable from indirect rule … When actors believe that certain options are ‘off the table’ because of an asymmetric (if tacit) contract, or consistently comply with the wishes of another because they recognize steep costs from noncompliance, then the relationship between the two becomes effectively one between ruler and ruled.50
Ordering the world requires that others be led, and, if not responsive to coaxing, more forcibly herded. The ordering power that demands compliance and rule-following from others will also reserve its prerogative not to be bound, on the basis that it is ‘special’. As Ikenberry frames it, this is what we mean by an imperial logic. Complaining about the foreign policy of President George W. Bush, Ikenberry noted that ‘it offered the world a system in which America rules the world but does not abide by rules. This is in effect, empire.’51 So it was. That also, however, describes US hegemony since its inception.
The liberal order proposition, supposed to help develop trust and mitigate the forces of anarchy, underestimates the problem of the security dilemma, the paradox of taking steps to increase security only to heighten insecurity. Even the most well-intended, benign project to order the planet will appear hostile and threatening to rivals and potential adversaries. What looks to the ascendant power like a harmony of interests and a morally obvious set of arrangements, derived from self-evident timeless principles that serve the common good, will look to some others like the enforcement of self-interest, dressed up as moral universalism. Rivals and adversaries with a history of predation, and being preyed upon, fear that beneath the hegemon’s insistence on an order of rules, it reserves a self-anointed right to enforce its preponderance by bending or breaking rules, routing around protocols and striking at will. Through the eyes of adversaries with long memories, it is too hard to distinguish American benevolent hegemony from a threatening preponderance of power. The hegemonic power may genuinely believe its own claims – that it doesn’t practise the ugly power politics of ‘spheres of influence’, expansion or trade protectionism. This makes the problem worse, for it will practise aggrandisement without awareness, being shocked when its obviously benign actions result in resistance.
Liberal order also has a problem with war itself. Its founding conviction is that ‘autocratic and militarist states make war; democracies make peace … this is the cornerstone of Wilsonianism and, more generally, the liberal international tradition’.52 This conviction tends towards belligerence. Making a world safe for democracy easily merges into making the world democratic. It slips readily into the further conceit that as ‘our’ actions are peaceful in their essence, the source of belligerence lies externally with other forces. Problems come not from tragic interactions but from malign external forces arrayed against a virtuous American hero-state. In turn, that logic supplies a warrant for applying righteous force. A commitment to permanent world-ordering strictly on one’s own terms then entails regular military action, occasionally rising to violent crescendos. Those in favour of a return to liberal order usually demand more power projection, greater alliance commitments, more military presence, not less. Yet while such enthusiasts have much to say in praise of military arrangements – alliances, joint exercises, doctrines and capabilities – and in criticism of failures to apply military force, they are notably shy about the process of wars conducted in the name of their ideals, and what they lead to. Projecting power to achieve international order has had domestic, illiberal consequences like the increase of state power and the unbalancing of the constitution. Two decades of war have frayed American liberties, institutions and solvency.
While the proposition of singular American ‘leadership’ as a world-ordering hegemon has become a self-evident value amongst traditionalists, this derives from nostalgia for a temporary and unsustainable moment in world politics, and one that its admirers romanticize too much. The extravagant vision – of America as a world-ordering superintendent with an appetite for unrivalled ‘global leadership’ – overstates the country’s power and knowledge. Historically, this has driven the USA into avoidable waste and misfortune. At its least reflective, the dream of liberal order produces a warlike righteousness, the instinct that chaos must be due only to a lack of power projection, ruling out the prudent consideration of retrenchment or adjustment. It serves to narrow rather than enlarge our imagination and choices, to reduce foreign policy to a dualistic contest between ‘leadership’ and ‘isolation’. For them, the lessons of history are clear and unambiguous, and derive almost entirely from a single atypical case, the failures of inter-war isolationism and appeasement. By casting itself as a liberal Leviathan with an exceptional global role and historical mission, the USA inadvertently makes itself a Jacobin state, forever seeking expansion of its sphere and promoting regime change and revolution. All the while, it attributes problems to ‘not enough’ American dominance. If we need an alternative banner under which to mobilize against Trump’s seductive promise of a return to greatness, that banner does not have to be just a refined version of what came before, an order that many experience as remote institutions, borderless, inhumane capitalism and war without end.
If the ultimate purpose of US statecraft must be to secure the republic – its institutions, its free way of life and its limited and constitutional government – as a good thing for itself and an exemplar to the world, other practices, drawn from a tradition of American realism, are a better bet. These too must be handled with care. Just as the targets of this book are vulnerable to nostalgia, so are we all. In observing the politics of nostalgia, we cannot presume to step outside consciousness of the past as a guide to action. Rather, the process of mining history for guidance should be richer, and open to a wider field of possibility.
Critique of liberal order also comes from the Marxist, critical and postcolonial wings of scholarship.53 In particular, Jeanne Morefield argues that literature proposing and defending liberal order has, at its heart, the contradictions of empire that deflect attention from its inconsistencies by insisting that whatever errors, crimes and disasters liberal projections of power lead to, there is always a pristine essence to which America can return.54 Morefield’s critique parallels my own, though in different terms, against those who advocate order without paying enough attention to what ‘ordering’ historically actually involves. Critical literature strives for emancipation. By exposing the affectations of ‘order’ arguments, Morefield seeks to add intellectual fire to the movement so as to turn the world away from imperialism and raison d’état, and to build a new humanist order.
By contrast, this book does not. In the tradition of classical realism, by stripping away euphemism, it seeks less to transform than to reveal the hard-wired realities and constraints of an anarchic world, the hard trade-offs it imposes. If emancipation is impossible in this pessimistic tradition, if some hypocrisy and brutality is inevitable, if states and their rulers cannot be ‘good’, they can at least be wiser and more self-aware. They can develop a prudential capacity to practise a more restrained and self-aware power politics, to husband power more than waste it, to practise intrigue and competition without excess brutality, and to wage war without it destroying the state, or, in America’s case, the republic.
In Chapter 1, ‘The Idea of Liberal Order’, I attempt to pin down the liberal order hypothesis as precisely as possible, to test it, and to bring its assumptions to the surface, arguing that liberal order rhetoric betrays an attraction-repulsion to empire. Chapter 2, ‘Darkness Visible’, forms the empirical spine of my argument. This chapter lays out a critique based on a review of the order’s history. I demonstrate that order-creating is a necessarily imperial, coercive process that is not amenable to the kind of consensual, consistent rule-enforcement and rule-following that its proponents are nostalgic for. Chapter 3, ‘Rough Beast’, argues that President Donald Trump is more a culmination of the order than an aberration from it. While subjectively, he and his opponents cast him as the antithesis of post-war foreign policy traditions, Trump embodies two long-running tendencies, towards permanent war and oligarchy. Chapter 4, ‘A Machiavellian Moment’, turns to the future. Washington must reckon with the survival of its institutions in an increasingly hostile world, but by realizing that, contrary to liberal order claims, it cannot domesticate the world to its liberal values. As before, the USA will have to make hard compromises, to prevent a more competitive world from destroying its republic.
We turn first, though, to liberal order as a hypothesis about the past, a complaint about the present and a prescription for the future.