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Join us tomorrow as we discuss the international order, past and future, before Trump and after, and my new book. THREAD https://quincyinst.org/event/the-liberal-order-before-trump-and-after/
In 1999, a decade after the fall of the wall, President Bill Clinton found American power at its apex. “Now we are at the height of our power and prosperity.” Like most hegemons, America sensed a mandate from history. Yet the moment of climax marked the point of decline.
Aghast that the time is out of join, with Trump, populist demagogues and dangerous authoritarian regimes abroad, a transatlantic security class looks back to a nobler past, a liberal, rules-based international order, superintended by a unique hegemon for the general good.
The Pax Americana was the gentlest we've had. But even it found the world an illiberal, insecure place of security-seeking states. "Leadership" was not just a consensual affair, but a coercive one. Nagasaki and Suez defined it as much as creating the UN or the Marshall Plan.
The leading power still confronted resistance, and resistance bred conflict. It designed institutions and rules - but broke, ignored or routed around rules too, to retain its advantage and believing it 'sees further.' And growing power, not matter how benign, scares rivals.
In such a world, some of America’s most far-reaching successes were the result of bargains with illiberal forces, terrible compromises. For most historic memorandums, there is a blood telegram.
In that same world, some of America’s greatest failures were a result of doctrinaire applications of high-minded ambition, to spread the light: economic shock therapy in Russia, or the transformation of the Greater Middle East via Baghdad. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122669374927229175
In a time of restoration politics, demagogues promise to restore greatness or control. There is also a liberal nostalgia. For Joe Biden, “America is coming back like we used to be. Ethical, straight, telling the truth...supporting our allies. All those good things."
As this version tells it, the liberal order was not perfect but is innocent of its own undoing. Its healthy mind and body are being assassinated – by enemies in league, at home and abroad – sinister foreign regimes and populists who stir the mob.
And so, the story goes, the US should restore its historical mission: return to global leadership, renew its vows with allies, restore free trade, turn back to the foreign policy establishment, and lead an international posse of democracies against the malign despots of Eurasia.
Now that American society bleeds with police brutality and racism, looting and civil strife, they argue that Washington must overcome its internal failures to restore its moral authority and resume the burden of global supremacy. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2020-06-12/new-civil-rights-movement-foreign-policy-win?utm_source=twitter_posts&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tw_daily_soc
But what if that accounting is wrong? What if Trump – his Caesarism, corruption and demagoguery is not a departure from prior failures but a consequence of them? What if civil strife erupts precisely, partly, because of decades of war? https://www.newstatesman.com/world/north-america/2020/06/revenge-forever-wars
What if the working class, and underclass, are right to sense that an oligarchic order is making wages stagnate, life lonely and precarious, with rising ‘despair deaths’ of drugs and suicide?
What if most veterans are right, that the campaigns of the War on Terror just weren’t worth the cost? 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/
In short, what if visions of one state’s global supremacy are part of the problem, a relic of an atypical moment in the past when power was lopsided? Especially in today’s more multipolar world were power and wealth are more diffuse, the obstacles to dominance greater.
The stories they – and we allies- tell about the past bear on our understanding of the choices now. To restore its great republic, the US must confront hard decisions.
To disaggregate enemies, balance some and accommodate others, learn to live with and deter regimes rather than topple them, and protect some industries rather than drive them offshore.
Its not a new debate. Its an old debate in new clothes. It restages the argument between the papacy and the Machiavellians.
Can a benign state unify and domesticate the world to its values? Or, to preserve its institutions and liberty, must the republic practice a more hard-headed and restrained power politics abroad, surviving in a world of difference? END
