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The historian Steven Shapin opened his account of The Scientific Revolution with the line: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” It is tempting to say much the same about the “liberal international order” (LIO), that “there is no such thing as the liberal international order and there are hundreds of books about it”. And this column, too.
There was a Scientific Revolution. And there has been since the Second World War a global framework that has helped order international relations. But whether that framework can be described as “liberal” or embodies what champions of the LIO claim it does – “an open world connected by the free flow of people, goods, ideas and capital” that was, in the words of Antony Blinken, the outgoing US secretary of state, “America’s greatest contribution to peace and progress” – is questionable.
The return to the White House of Donald Trump, with his “America First” policies and contempt for international organisations and treaties, has resurrected fears about the survival of the LIO. “For the first time since the 1930s,” G John Ikenberry, a leading liberal internationalist, warned in 2018, a year into Trump’s first term, that “the United States has elected a president who is actively hostile to liberal internationalism”. America would no longer provide the “hegemonic leadership” necessary for “fostering cooperation and championing ‘free world’ values”.
Trump’s bombastic comments about the use of force to assert US sovereignty over Greenland and the Panama Canal, his reluctance to keep arming Ukraine, his admiration for Vladimir Putin and his disparagement of international treaties have all, on the eve of his second coming, exacerbated such fears.
Part of the problem in making sense of this debate, and these fears, is that the LIO is a slippery beast, understood in a multitude of ways, and one that has constantly changed shape. For those, like Blinken, who eulogise it, its origins lie at the end of Second World War in the creation of a set of multilateral treaties and institutions, from Nato to the World Bank, that aimed to bind nations and forestall another global conflict.
Nobody, though, talked of “liberal internationalism” at the time. The new institutions and treaties were established primarily to entrench US power on its side of the cold war, to contain Soviet expansion and to aid the transition from a world of empires to one of sovereign states under the tutelage of the American “hegemon”. As the historian of the cold war John Lewis Gaddis has observed: “Without anyone’s having designed it… the nations of the postwar era lucked into a system of international relations that, because it has been based upon realities of power, has served the cause of order – if not justice – better than one might have expected.”
Only in the 1970s and 80s, amid the trauma of American defeat in Vietnam, the historian Samuel Moyn argues, did the concept acquire greater traction, and “liberal internationalism assumed its current form, stressing rules and rights”. Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and the arrival of what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history” and the seeming triumph of liberal democracy. Now, the idea of a “liberal international order” came into its own.
This was, though, less an era than a moment. Triumphalism was short-lived and, after 9/11, most western leaders accepted that any defence of the liberal order required the use of the most illiberal of tools, from torture and rendition to assassinations and invasions. Within a decade, the financial collapse of 2008 and the rise of Chinese influence on the global stage generated despondent warnings about “the end of the liberal order that never existed”, as the political scientist Michael N Barnett acidly put it.
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Throughout this history, the LIO interwove the economic and the geopolitical. And, within both threads, the desire for order took precedence over any belief in “liberalism”. The economic aim was to keep the world safe for global free markets, not through the pursuit of laissez-faire policies but, as the historian Quinn Slobodian has shown, by “designing institutions… to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy” and establishing “rules set by supranational bodies operating beyond the reach of any electorate”. This was the project of neoliberalism, born in the 1930s through the work of economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and coming to fruition in the post-cold war period, through the institutions and mechanisms of the liberal international order.
The consequence has been the growth of inequality, the erosion of civil society and a burgeoning sense of resentment within sections of the electorate across the globe at being rendered politically voiceless. Trump, like other populist leaders, has been a beneficiary of the backlash against the “liberal elite”.
The success of figures such as Trump with their anti-globalist stance has led many to celebrate the “end of neoliberalism”. Yet, many of those who gained from the neoliberal order are at the heart of the Trump project, too; not least “tech bros” such as Elon Musk. The triumphant globalism of the post-cold war era might be no more, but many components of neoliberalism are now being refracted through the lens of an assertive nationalism.
The geopolitical aspects of the LIO are equally contradictory. Western leaders might have preached liberalism, democracy and the rule of law, but from Chile to the Congo, Indonesia to Saudi Arabia, they willingly undermined all three and underwrote illiberalism and authoritarianism when it suited their needs.
Proponents of the LIO laud it as having ensured peace. “Peace”, though, has not meant the absence of war, merely the prevention of direct war between the major powers. According to Tufts University’s Military Intervention Project, of the nearly 400 US military interventions abroad between 1776 and 2019, the majority have been since 1945, and a quarter since 1989.
Long before Trump’s grandiloquent America First proclamations, US leaders were pursuing what Monica Duffy Toft, a founder of the Military Intervention Project, calls “kinetic diplomacy” – “diplomacy by armed force”; this has been a “clear trend” in the 21st century, promoted not least by such liberal internationalists as Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
There is certainly much to be concerned about US policy in the coming period. But challenging Trump does not require us to romanticise what went before, or to eulogise a liberal order that never was. We need rather to rethink what we mean by internationalism in this age of assertive nationalism.
