The False Promise of Liberal Order. Patrick Porter
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