The False Promise of Liberal Order. Patrick Porter
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.
Notes
1 1. Richard Ned Lebow, The Rise and Fall of Political Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 7–8.
2 2. Tacitus, On the Life and Character of Julius Agricola (AD 98).
3 3. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 24.
4 4. ‘Remarks by President Donald Tusk before the G7 Summit in Charlevoix, Canada’, at https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2018/06/08/remarks-by-president-donald-tusk-before-the-g7-summit-in-charlevoix-canada/.
5 5. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 209.
6 6. Cited in Phillips Payson O’Brien, British and American Naval Power: Politics and Policy, 1900–1936 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), p. 117.
7 7. Warren Zimmerman, First Great Triumph (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), p. 476.
8 8. UN Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures, ‘Sanctions on Iran and Cuba Need Phasing Out, Says Expert’, 29 July 2015, at https://news.un.org/en/audio/2015/07/602872. I am grateful to Nicholas Mulder on this point.
9 9. Stephen Kotkin, ‘Why Realism Explains the World’, Foreign Affairs 97:4 (2018), pp. 10–15: p. 10.
10 10. Michael Burke, ‘Biden: “The America I See Does Not Wish to Turn Our Back on the World”’, The Hill, 17 February 2019.
11 11. ‘Democrats and Foreign Policy: There’s Something Happening Here’, The Economist, 4 May 2019.
12 12. Julio Rosas, ‘Joe Biden Says He Wants to Make America Straight Again’, Washington Examiner, 25 April 2019.
13 13. Anne Applebaum, ‘Is This the End of the West as We Know It?’ Washington Post, 4 March 2016; Patrick M. Stewart, ‘Trump and World Order: The Return of Self-Help’, Foreign Affairs 96:2 (March/April 2017), pp. 52–57; James Kirchick, The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).
14 14. ‘Is the Liberal Order in Peril?’ Foreign Affairs (online), n.d., at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ask-the-experts/liberal-order-peril.
15 15. Statement of Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bilt, promoting the Declaration of Principles for Freedom, Prosperity and Peace, at https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/programs/brent-scowcroft-center/fsr-initiative/declaration-of-principles.
16 16. Klaus Schwab, ‘Globalisation 4.0: The Davos 2019 Manifesto’, at https://www.rappler.com/thought-leaders/220862-davos-2019-manifesto-globalization; Adam Tooze, ‘Framing Crashed’, at https://adamtooze.com/2019/02/09/framing-crashed-10-a-new-bretton-woods-and-the-problem-of-economic-order-also-a-reply-to-adler-and-varoufakis/.
17 17. Susan B. Glasser, ‘John McCain’s Funeral Was the Biggest Resistance Gathering Yet’, New Yorker, 1 September 2018; Ishaan Tharoor, ‘Trump, McCain and the Waning of the Liberal Order’, Washington Post, 27 August 2018.
18 18. Charles A. Kupchan, ‘Unpacking Hegemony: The Social Foundations of Hierarchical Order’, in G. John Ikenberry, Power, Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 19–61: pp. 25–27.
19 19. Patrick O’Brien, ‘The Pax Britannica and American Hegemony: Precedent, Antecedent or Just Another History?’, in Patrick O’Brien and Armand Clesse, eds., Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846–1914 and the United States 1941–2001 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 3–64: pp. 3–4.
20 20. Robert Kagan, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperilled World (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2018).
21 21. ‘Why We Should Preserve International Institutions and Order’, New York Times, 23 July 2018.
22 22. ‘Petition: Preserving Alliances’, July 2018, at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSesHdZWxpp13plS4nkLOSMHv4Dg1jaksBrCC6kWv6OfVAmO5g/viewform.
23 23. Foreign Affairs Select Committee, China and the Rules-Based International System: Sixteenth Report of Session 2017–19 HC 612, 4 April 2019.
24 24. Adam Garfinkle, ‘Parsing the Liberal International Order’, The American Interest, 27 October 2017.
25 25. Centre for American Progress, ‘America Adrift: How the US Foreign Policy Debate Misses What Voters Really Want’, 5 May 2019, at https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/reports/2019/05/05/469218/america-adrift/; Ruth Igielnik and Kim Parker, ‘Majorities of US Veterans, Public Say the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Were Not Worth Fighting’, Pew Research Center, 10 July 2019, at https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/10/majorities-of-u-s-veterans-public-say-the-wars-in-iraq-and-afghanistan-were-not-worth-fighting/.
26 26. Damir Murasic, ‘Making up Monsters to Destroy: The Illiberal Challenge’, The American Interest 14:5 (2019).
27 27. Perry Anderson, The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (London: Verso, 2017), pp. 1–4.
28 28. Joseph Nye, Condoleezza Rice, Nicholas Burns, Leah Bitounis and Jonathon Price, The World Turned Upside Down: Maintaining American Leadership in a Dangerous Age (Aspen, CO: Aspen Institute, 2017); Kurt Campbell, Eric Edelman, Michèle Flournoy, et al., Extending American Power: Strategies to Expand US Engagement in a Competitive World Order (Washington, DC: Centre for a New American Security, May 2016).
29 29. Kenneth P. Vogel, ‘Concerned by Trump, Some Republicans Quietly Align with Democrats’, New York Times, 24 May 2018; see also the American Enterprise Institute and the Centre for American Progress, ‘Partnership in Peril: The Populist Assault on the Transatlantic Community’, at https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/reports/2018/07/31/454248/partnership-in-peril/.
30 30. Stephen Wertheim, ‘Return of the Neocons’, New York Review of Books, 2 January 2019.
31 31. Julian Borger, ‘Trump is Building a New Liberal Order, says Pompeo’, Guardian, 4 December 2018; Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘A Senior White House Official Defines the Trump Doctrine: We’re America, Bitch’, The Atlantic, 11 June 2018.
32 32. G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After