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  1. International Politics
14 January 2025

The myth of the liberal international order

Donald Trump can’t break what doesn’t exist.

By Hans Kundnani

When Donald Trump was first elected as US president in 2016, the foreign policy establishment came out in defence of the so-called liberal international order – the shorthand for the system of institutions, norms and rules that had developed after the end of World War II – which they feared Trump would trash. Eight years later, Trump is heading back to the White House. But this time it doesn’t seem as if there is much of a liberal international order left to defend – and that is as much because of the actions of the Biden administration as the first Trump administration. 

It was always unclear what exactly the liberal international order was. It had different elements (a security order, an economic order, and a human rights order), it functioned differently in different parts of the world (for example it was very different in western Europe than it was in Asia). It had also evolved over time (in particular, the post-Cold War order was very different from the Cold War order). Moreover, it was never entirely clear what made it “liberal” or what that even meant. 

However, few foreign policy experts were interested in these complexities. Instead, they invoked the term – which the realist international relations theorist Graham Allison aptly called “conceptual Jello-O” – as a way to criticise almost any deviation from the post-Cold War American foreign policy strategy of liberal hegemony. Instead of thinking about how to reform the liberal international order in order to make it more legitimate and sustainable, they uncritically defended it. 

As the historian Michael Kimmage has shown, the idea of the liberal international order, theorised by academics like John Ikenberry at Princeton, had emerged as an organising principle for US foreign policy during the Obama administration. (Kimmage himself worked in the State Department during the Obama administration.) It was a kind of replacement for the outdated civilizational idea of the West – as Kimmage puts it, “a technocrat’s idea of the West” that focused less on culture and more on institutions – though which institutions were “liberal” and therefore part of the order was also unclear.  

The liberal international order was often understood as being “rules-based”, though the rules – especially the rules of the post-Cold war economic order – were created by the West and “rigged” in their favour. But during the Obama administration, the term became popular as a way for Western diplomats and experts to criticise rule-breaking by non-Western powers, especially China and Russia. 

In some ways, President Trump did break with the order. While he cut taxes and regulations, he also imposed tariffs in an attempt to support domestic manufacturing breaking with the economic liberalism of the post-Cold War international order – what you might call national neoliberalism. On security questions, there was less of a break – although Trump had threatened to pull the US out of Nato, he never followed through. In fact, his administration made greater commitments to allies – and to Ukraine – than Obama had.  

When Joe Biden took over from Trump as president in 2020, he initially sought to make democracy the new framing principle for American foreign policy. In particular, he sought to bring together the world’s democracies to join forces against authoritarian powers. Thus, the Democrats – who had become more hawkish on Russia than the Republicans, not least because of Russia’s perceived interference in the 2016 election – revived the neoconservatism that had been discredited by the Iraq war.  

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However, after Biden had been in office for just over a year, the Russian invasion of Ukraine put an end to the idea of a “community of democracies”. Much as many people in Europe and the US imagined that the war in Ukraine was the frontline in the global struggle between democracies and authoritarian states, it quickly became clear that non-Western democracies like Brazil, India and South Africa did not see it that way. The West turned in on itself – united, but isolated. 

And so, the idea of “the West” has made a comeback – a regression to pre-Obama civilisational thinking. But to make matters worse, the West is often conflated with the idea of democracy as if the only democracies in the world are in the West and all non-Western countries were authoritarian states. 

Then came 7 October and Israel’s war in Gaza. Even as they continued to express outrage about everything that Russia was doing in Ukraine – occupying territory, killing civilians, bombing schools and hospitals and so on – the American, British and German governments have supported Israel as it did the same things in Gaza. It became absolutely clear that to policymakers in the West, some lives were less valuable than others. 

If there was one particular moment when the idea of the liberal international order became a joke, it may have been last autumn when, as the world’s leaders met at the United Nations in New York, Israel – still protected at the Security Council by the US and the UK much as they once protected apartheid South Africa – expanded the war and invaded Lebanon.  

In the end, whether you think that that the liberal international order has died over the past year or that it was exposed as a sham depends on your view of international politics. Liberal international relations theorists believe in progress in international politics, especially through the creation of institutions, norms and rules that constrain states. The liberal international order was the expression of that belief. 

Realist theorists, on the other hand, have always tended to see such institutions, norms and rules as either dangerously utopian or as a smokescreen. Ultimately, they believe, the powerful do what they want – and at the moment the world seems to be confirming their pessimistic analysis. 

[See more: Europe’s Ukraine delusional]

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