So this is how the so-called liberal international order ends. Not with a bang, but with a Trump.
That, at least, is how Western and especially European elites perceive the crumbling of the Western alliance and the decay of assorted international conventions – as the world-destroying handiwork of the disruptor-in-chief and his gang of vandals. In the US’s new tariff-charged trade wars with allies and, above all, in the seeming abandonment of Ukraine and perhaps even America’s fellow NATO members in Europe, they see a US administration determined to ‘destroy the rules-based world order’ and replace it with one based on ‘might is right’, as one liberal pundit has it. The Trump administration is not so much ushering in a ‘brave new world’, argues another, as ‘reverting to a dangerous old one’, dominated by great-power rivalries.
In one regard, they’re right. We are in the midst of a tectonic shift in international relations. A rebalancing of global power as potentially significant as that which finally undid the world order of the 19th century. Established after the Napoleonic Wars, and semi-formalised in the Concert of Europe in 1820, that world order, originally dominated by Britain, France, Austria and Prussia, came undone as vast empires rotted from within and a unified Germany rose during the long 19th century. Indeed, today’s American-dominated world order, which has held since the end of the Second World War, does now seem to be buckling, as Western nations’ relative decline fuels the assertiveness of regional powers and, in the shape of China, a global superpower.
But in another, more important regard, the Trump blamers are wrong – wrong, that is, to hold a single administration responsible for the disintegration of the US-dominated world order. Trump is not the cause of its breaking apart. Rather, he is in many ways responding to its death rattle and standing by to administer its last rites.
For this is a system of global power, a world order, that has long been crumpling under the weight of its own contradictions. A ‘rules-based order’ which the dominant powers have long been free to flout. An order supposedly based on the principle of national sovereignty in which various nations’ sovereignty has been undermined in the name of ‘humanitarian’ intervention. An order that rhetorically esteems democracy while empowering unaccountable, transnational technocratic political elites. And an order, ultimately, that was moulded around a geopolitical reality that has long since ceased to exist.
Indeed, today’s world order was born over 80 years ago, in the shadow of the Second World War. One can see its initial beginnings in the Atlantic Charter of 1941, when British prime minister Winston Churchill and US president Franklin D Roosevelt set out their states’ shared vision for a postwar future, promoting territorial integrity, national self-government, democracy and free trade.
By 1945, when this new postwar world order was starting to take shape, America was the world’s pre-eminent power. Its key allies, Britain and the USSR, may also have emerged victorious from the war, but they did so at enormous human and economic cost, and were in no position to shape the world in their image. At this point, the US economy was three times the size of the Soviet Union’s and five times that of Britain. From the outset, then, the postwar world order was to be an expression of America’s dominant, global position and sustained by its power. As historian Adam Tooze once put it, ‘America isn’t subject to gravity; America is gravity: America is the gravitational force that organises global power in the 20th century.’
The institutional structures initially established in the mid-to-late 1940s reflected that American gravity. At Bretton Woods in 1944, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were brought to life, and the dollar was installed as the reserve currency of the international monetary system. At the same time, at Dumbarton Oaks, US officials rigged up the Security Council, which was to be at the heart of the future United Nations, granting permanent member status to the US and its war-time allies. In 1945, the UN itself was established in San Francisco.
Yet, as US presidents Roosevelt and then Truman were beginning to remake the postwar world in America’s image, they soon encountered resistance from the Soviet Union, especially in Eastern Europe. The advent of the Cold War proper in 1947 gave a new adversarial dynamic to America’s attempt to forge the postwar order. It also gave American power projection, and its vision of global capitalism, with a sense of purpose, an ideological definition. America was able to define itself against the Soviets, posing as the global defender of freedom and democracy against the Red Menace.
Not that it was entirely sincere. In private, George Kennan, a senior US diplomat and chief architect of the Cold War ‘containment’ approach to the USSR, likened democracy to one of those ‘prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin’. Like many of his establishment contemporaries, he believed in governance by experts insulated from the public.
America’s Cold War power projection played out, above all, in Europe, where Washington set about turning its advanced industrialised regions, devastated by war, into prosperous outposts of the free world, and bulwarks against Communism, pumping in some £13 billion as part of the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s. Alongside the economic aid, the US also provided military muscle. This led, in 1949, to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, otherwise known as NATO. This ensured a permanent US military presence in Western Europe. The aim, in the infamous words of its first NATO secretary-general, was to keep the Americans in, the Germans down and the Soviets out. In 1951, under the watchful eye of Washington, Western European allies formed the European Coal and Steel Community – a treaty-based institution that would eventually morph into the European Union.
The World Bank, the UN, NATO and successive European treaties – these were the economic, political and military building blocks of the postwar order. This postwar order was forged in the interests of the US and its Western alliance, and shaped by the exigencies of the Cold War. The tensions between the particular interests of the US and its supposed allies did cause ructions at points, most notably in the early 1970s, when the economies of Japan and West Germany started to rapidly outpace that of America. But by and large, the American postwar order held firm.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. And in 1991, the Soviet Union disintegrated. The Cold War-era institutions that gave shape and structure to Soviet power, such as the Warsaw Pact, dissolved, too. America was energised. While it no longer had the Soviet Union to define itself against, it still had tremendous economic and military power – including a military presence in over 100 countries around the world. There were also now countless more nations to be incorporated into the postwar order. Here was a chance to bring history to an end.
This was the moment of so-called globalisation. The moment when the American postwar order, complete with its Cold War-era institutions, was repurposed for a supposedly post-ideological age – as ‘the liberal international order’, to use the name given to it in the 1990s by US political scientist John Ikenberry.
With America now the only global superpower, the liberal international order was primed for expansion. From the moment George HW Bush announced the coming of a New World Order in 1991, where the UN-sanctioned rule of law would govern all nations, and then won near unanimous backing for the first Gulf War, the US set about bringing more and more of the globe into its legal, political orbit. The postwar order – encompassing America, Western Europe and Japan – was about to go truly global.
At one level, this project of globalising the postwar order was defined by ‘humanitarianism’. I put it in quote marks because that term, which sounds so unobjectionable, has actually led to no end of conflict. Indeed, humanitarianism provided the justification for countless military interventions, carried out by a revamped NATO – from the aerial bombardment of Bosnia in the mid-1990s to the war in Kosovo in 1999 to the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s. While Western elites championed these interventions, on the grounds they were the ‘right thing to do’, these clear violations and suppressions of national sovereignty were simultaneously eroding the key principles of the postwar order – namely, territorial integrity and a people’s right to self-determination.
The project of building the ‘liberal’ international order was, in fact, thoroughly technocratic: an attempt to subsume and enmesh nation states in a transnational system of rules and regulations, all under the aegis of America. This led, in 1995, to the formation of the World Trade Organisation, an institution tasked with regulating the emergent capitalist globe.
By 2000, Bill Clinton was openly championing the technocratic management of world affairs. He defied anti-globalisation protesters, telling them, ‘We will – we must – support the rules-based system’. Britain’s Labour government backed Clinton using the same language. ‘There is no alternative to a rules-based system for international trade’, said the then president of the UK Board of Trade, Stephen Byers.
The technocratic nature of the international order was fully brought home a decade later, by then US secretary of state Hillary Clinton. In her Democratic circles, the idea of a ‘rules-based order’ no longer applied just to the global market place, but to the political world order in general. She and others argued for a world regulated and governed by those who know best, and insulated from the disruptive, supposedly irrational behaviours of nation states and their restive populaces.
This was American power-projection bereft of any of the ideological dressing of the Cold War period. America no longer posed as the leader of the free world, but as the regulator of the rules-bound world. As President Obama put it in 2016, ‘America should write the rules. America should call the shots. Other countries should play by the rules that America and our partners set, and not the other way around.’
Perhaps for a brief ‘unipolar’ moment in the post-Cold War period, it really did appear as if America’s gravitational pull was irresistible. NATO continued to pull in more of Europe under America’s nuclear umbrella, while the WTO continued to expand its membership. China joined the WTO in 2001 while Russia signed up in 2012.
Yet, by the time Russia joined, the liberal international order was already creaking. Most obviously, the economic crisis of 2008 had shaken the US and its Western alliance, and bolstered China, the world’s most dynamic economy. A shift in the global balance of power fundamentally changed a world order still premised on the geopolitical realities of the late 1940s.
More importantly, the US and its allies had sown the seeds of the liberal international order’s own future problems. The NATO-delivered ‘humanitarian’ interventions of the 1990s and 2000s, right up until the disastrous intervention in Libya in 2011, intensified the insecurity of regional powers, not least Russia. They also rode roughshod over the postwar order’s own supposed principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty. Indeed, it was telling that when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Putin invoked the jargon of humanitarian interventionism to justify it, talking of Moscow’s need to protect Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population from ‘genocide‘.
But the problems go deeper. For all Western leaders’ talk of democracy and freedom, the world order’s governing institutions, from the UN to the EU to the WTO, were always designed to insulate the global economy from nation states and, above all, from their electorates. This has created huge conflicts not just on the periphery of the liberal international order, but also in its Western core. On the one hand, you have a connected, globally oriented elite, benefitting from the fruits of the status quo, and on the other, you have a mass of disenfranchised, disempowered citizens – a restive populace that, after the economic crash in 2008, was hit hard. Think, for example, of the way in which crisis-struck Greece was punished in the name of budgetary rules, by the EU and the IMF, two key institutions of the liberal international order. While the elite classes evangelise over the rules-based order, the rest of us live in nations that have been denuded of power and hollowed out by that self-same order.
In 2016, the people revolted. Voters in the US presidential election and the EU referendum in Britain didn’t just reject their respective party-political establishments. They also rejected the entire globalist consensus that benefitted state and corporate elites while denying them democratic clout.
Subsequent populist revolts throughout Europe show that the US-led liberal international order has effectively dug its own grave. Its hypocritical militarism has undermined national sovereignty. For one thing, the thoughtless expansionism of NATO served to antagonise Russia and lend it a pretext, an excuse, to brutally invade Ukraine. Above all, the attempt to subsume nations into a rules-based order, super-powering globalist institutions such as the EU, has fomented popular and populist resistance throughout the West.
It’s worth remembering that the Concert of Europe wasn’t just brought down by the rise of Germany. It was also undermined by domestic, often working-class, rebellion throughout Europe during the mid-19th century. Indeed, there are striking parallels between the revolutions of 1848, in which Europe’s peoples fought for national independence and democratic reform against Europe’s imperial elites, and today’s populist revolts against the technocrats.
Donald Trump didn’t cause the liberal international order to crumble. But he has undoubtedly thrived among its crumbling, riding to power on a wave of popular discontent and hope for a freer, more democratic, less war-mongering future. One in which the interests of workers are put ahead of those of the globalist elites.
Of course, Trump’s dismissive posture towards Ukraine and its fight for independence displays a dispiriting lack of concern for national sovereignty beyond the US’s own borders. But his rise – and those of other populist figures – certainly reflects the desire to reaffirm sovereignty and popular sovereignty among ordinary people, against a liberal world order designed to restrain hard-won democratic rights.
Whatever else happens next, the liberal world order is gone – and it isn’t coming back. The question now is what might replace it.
Tim Black is a spiked columnist.
#globalists #dug #grave
