The post-Cold War liberal rule-based international order is now increasingly acknowledged to be either dead or in a coma. Some Trump Administration officials claim that a calculated plan to destroy the old order lies behind the administration’s seemingly chaotic approach to foreign affairs. Naturally, the question arises as to what has led to the liberal order’s death or near-death experience at such a young age, well before making it to 40. One would have expected a somewhat longer life from an international order that was supposed to come after the “End of History”. A variety of explanations for this early demise have been offered, blaming, for example, the coming to power of Trump, as well as the rise of China, the 2008 global financial crisis and the “forever wars”. However, the problem with the liberal order was that its’ own design was fatally flawed from the start. It was liberal by flowery pronouncement and occasional policy, but not in its own structure.
Liberal thought is quite diverse. Much of it has also been traditionally quite sceptical of democracy despite its frequent modern association with it. However, the various liberal perspectives all share some key aspects in regard to what is needed for stable liberal political orders at any level to endure. Firstly, the rule of law must bind both the rulers and the ruled. Secondly, significant external constraints on the leader (or leaders’) ability to act, such as, for example, the separation of powers, or the limitation on the leaders’ ability to enact many types of policies without gaining the support of some other political actors independent of them in some manner.
When the liberal rule-based international order emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the world failed to design an international system in line with liberal principles on these most crucial aspects. The U.S. became an uncontested global hegemon with no other power able to contest or balance it. The U.S. has had, in the Post-Cold War era, more freedom of action abroad than almost any great power has ever had in human history. French foreign minister Herbert Vedrine’s reference to the U.S. in 1999 as a “hyperpower” captured how far the United States exceeded past superpowers. Indeed, save for nuclear deterrents, there were no significant external constraints on the U.S. government’s ability to act abroad – even if the results were often not what Washington wanted. The restrictions on the U.S. ability to act around the world were largely internal; namely, its own decision-makers’ (and publics’) moral preferences and, more importantly, domestic constraints derived from its own publics’ sometimes limited willingness to bear the actual or potential burdens some U.S. actions abroad potentially entailed.
Having an illiberal global power structure to manage a supposed liberal world order led exactly to the outcome that liberal thought itself would predict. The United States did initially promote some important liberal values, such as free(r) trade, stronger international institutions, and a major expansion of international law, building a more liberal international system in practice at the start of the post-Cold War era. However, without major external constraints to stop it, there was nothing to stop the U.S. whenever it had the whim, or a shift in U.S. domestic public opinion, to damage and destroy the liberal structures it itself had helped to strengthen or build.
For example, after the September 11 attacks temporarily shifted U.S. public opinion to be much more supportive of the use of force against terrorism in general and for efforts to transform countries perceived as incubuses of terrorism in particular, the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 with neither a clear self-defence rationale nor a UN Security Council authorisation. The Bush administration did so after implicitly admitting the international legal need for a special international authorisation in this case by unsuccessfully seeking a UNSC resolution authorising the war, but felt free to ignore legalities, even as the rest of the world largely opposed the invasion. As part of this war and the wider war on terror, the U.S. blatantly violated the 1984 convention against torture through the mass torture of actual and suspected terrorists. These high-handed U.S. behaviours weakened both the UN Security Council and key aspects of international law that the U.S. government had spent years promoting.
Likewise, usually due to opposition of the U.S. public or some key domestic interest groups, the U.S. frequently failed to sign or ratify various significant international agreements ranging from the Convention on the Law of the Seas to the Arms Trade Treaty, leaving itself free from all of their constraints. This refusal to sign or ratify occurred many times after U.S. representatives shaped much of these treaties’ content when they were being drafted. Furthermore, the U.S., in multiple cases, insisted that other countries nevertheless abide by these very international treaties that the U.S. had exempted itself from. Such U.S. behaviour further weakened the strength and credibility of international law.
Similarly, when U.S. public opinion on international trade began to shift in the 2010s, multiple U.S. administrations, starting with Obama’s actions against the WTO’s appeals board and a massive multi-decade increase in highly potent forms of unilateral U.S. sanctions, were easily able to unilaterally weaken and eventually demolish much of the WTO and the global free trade system that it itself built. This is despite much of the world’s staunch opposition to many of these unilateral U.S. moves. In neither case have other major world powers even been able to do much more than, at best, partially protect themselves from the consequences.
With such an unstable structural basis for a liberal world order, its collapse or entry into a severe crisis in the medium term was just a matter of time until some chance event affecting the U.S., or new domestic policy demand, would emerge that would cause the U.S. government, advertently or inadvertently, to give it the final blow. Even in an alternate universe in which Trump had never become president would probably see the liberal order by around now either dying or experiencing a severe crisis due to a different chain of events.
Accordingly, any post-Trump attempts to resurrect the liberal rule-based order, or create a new world order embodying liberal principles in some manner, will need, for its long-term stability, to be structurally more in line with liberal principles- not just some outputs and words. Any international law existing under the new system must equally bind the U.S. in practice as much as it binds other states. Special mechanisms will need to be constructed to ensure such constraints in practice, such as requiring that (as is the case in some other countries) any international treaty the U.S. signs and ratifies becomes automatically equivalent within the U.S. to any domestic law passed by the U.S. Congress.
Global hegemony by the U.S., or any other country, must be rejected. Global leadership instead must be in the plural- composed of multiple strong countries, both democratic and authoritarian, able to restrain the U.S. and each other across the global policy spectrum whenever needed. Only a rule-based world order based on actual liberal structural principles will have a fighting chance of enduring for long.
Further Reading on E-International Relations
