refugees, and intensifying security competition. Only recently, the black flags of the Islamic State flew above Mosul. There are the agonies of the Arab Spring revolutions, which lurched into despotic reaction in some countries, state implosion in others. Economic protectionism is again on the rise. Crisis also rises within, in the fallout over Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU), nationalist populist movements in Europe, Asia and Latin America, and the coming of authoritarian ‘strongmen’. In particular, political tumult and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency have driven anxious commentators to lament the collapse of a post-1945 universe of institution-building, rule-following and enlightened leadership. Growing discord makes more faceless but tangible terrors, like the climate crisis, even more daunting.
These disturbances draw a widening cast of transatlantic security officials, experts, scholars, politicians, military officers, mandarins, plutocrats and public intellectuals to offer nostalgic visions of the past, and to speak of a political end time.13 They either warn that the survival of a rules-based liberal world order is at stake, or they write its obituary. We are witnessing the ‘end of the West as we know it’, the abandonment of ‘global leadership’ by its ‘long-time champion’, and a ‘Coming Dark Age’. Foreign Affairs, the house organ of the foreign policy establishment, recently asked thirty-two experts ‘Is the Liberal Order in Peril?’. Twenty-six agreed, confidently, that it is.14
The new disorder attracts grand claims. At the 2019 Munich Security Conference, former leaders issued a Declaration of Principles that underpinned the post-war order: ‘democracy; free, fair, and open markets; and the rule of law’.15 With a stroke of the pen, history’s darkness is banished and a world of discrepant experiences is wished away, from the killing fields of the Cold War, to the centres of authoritarian power, to the long history of post-war mercantilism. This is history at high altitude. From a similar height come the manifestos of the World Economic Forum at the Swiss ski resort at Davos and its ahistorical ‘exhortatory slogans’.16 The funeral of US Senator John McCain in September 2018, which was likened to a ‘Resistance meeting’, called forth praise for the cause of armed liberalism, and lamentations for the order’s passing, with McCain’s death marking its recessional hymn.17 A large literature has formed, praising the liberal order. With honourable exceptions, the liberal order version of the past is a panegyric, a speech of praise. With their ideals under strain, proponents of these views circle their wagons and tend towards a sectarian style. They celebrate orthodoxies – free trade, expanding alliances, order-enforcing military action, American global leadership – and denounce heresies, such as protectionism, military restraint, non-intervention and détente with enemies.
If the heart of liberalism is the promise of liberation from tyranny, then the panegyrics suggest that Washington achieved security in an enlightened way by reshaping the world – or large parts of it – in its liberal image. America’s domestic norms flowed outwards, reproducing in the world the socioeconomic order that prevails at home.18 Because of this liberal character, the victorious superpower exercised not mere power, but global leadership and deep engagement, creating peace-promoting institutions. America underwrote the system with its unprecedented power, while also subordinating itself to it. Instead of power untamed, the new order was based, above all, on rules and regularity. The Pax Americana repudiated the old statecraft that had culminated in total war and genocide, in imperial domination and cut-throat geopolitics, land grabs and spheres of influence, protectionist tariff blocs and economic autarky, and zero-sum, violent nationalism. Unlike the brute dominance of empire and its rule by command, it was American hegemony that allegedly presided, a type of power based more on rule by consent and legitimate authority, providing public goods and ‘flexibly enforced rules’.19 As first citizen among nations, America both subordinated itself to rules, structures and protocols, yet was also a new Leviathan, restraining itself and, by doing so, acquiring authority. The new order was imperfect, its admirers agree. Its institutions need reinventing. Still, it created unprecedented relative prosperity and prevented major wars. It is a world, they believe, worth fighting for, as the jungle grows back.20
These sentiments are also voiced by the professoriate. A July 2018 manifesto against Trump, an advertisement paid for by forty-three professors of International Relations in the New York Times,21 resulted in an online petition signed by hundreds of eminences of the discipline.22 More measured than other panegyrics, even this statement treats its claims as self-evident truths, advanced by appeals to authority, and offering a sanitized historical picture of the USA as dutiful global citizen, deferring to the institutions it created.
The thrust of these claims is that the world can again be ordered in the enlightened design of a global system, run for the common good by a far-sighted superpower that legitimizes its order by willingly constraining itself. Liberal order visionaries counsel Washington to restore a battered tradition, to uphold economic and security commitments, and to promote liberal values. To interpret recent disappointments as a reason for revising orthodox positions, they warn, is an overreaction. The literature explains in detail why various actors from Trump to Putin pose threats. Yet it is also notable for its presumptuousness about its referent object. The rules-based system, assumed a priori as a real thing worth defending, for instance, by Britain’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee, is the axiomatic historical starting point.23
The rhetoric has become an incantation. It is all the more striking for being relatively recent, a new vocabulary for what is supposed to be a single unbroken project pursued by the Atlantic West for generations. ‘The less the actual liberal international order resembled the conditions of its early zenith’, one observer notes, ‘the greater became the need to name it.’24 The worse international conditions get, the more the incantations repeat, as though repeating them will somehow sing a lost world back into life. The UK’s National Security Strategy of 2015, written in the glare of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Islamic State’s eruption in the Middle East, repeated the phrase ‘rules-based order’ thirty times, Australia’s Defence White Paper of 2016 thirty-eight times.
Thus far, constant reaffirmation is not faring well. It is not easing the present disorder, nor converting alienated voters, nor dampening the ambitions of America’s rivals. Cross-sections of voters report that the notion of liberal order baffles and underwhelms them, while the majority of veterans agree with the majority of the general public that America’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria were wasteful.25 For those in the audience with doubts, it feels more like being ‘preached at’ than being informed.26
The claim that America’s order was exceptional, and the hegemony/ empire distinction, echoes the exceptionalist claims of previous great powers. It is an old conceit. It dates back at least to nineteenth-century Britain, another time of dispute over the relation between liberalism and empire. The Victorian historian and banker George Grote projected the same fantasy, of non-imperial hegemony, onto classical Greece, distinguishing Athens’s benign leadership of a coalition from oppressive Persian overlordship. The Greeks, however, used the terms ‘hegemony’ and ‘empire’ interchangeably.27 They had a point. For even between ‘friends’ in the international arena, interests eventually diverge. When they do, even benign stronger powers have a habit of bringing their strength to bear.
Euphemizing the exercise of power, this worldview should not survive interrogation. It simply leaves out too much contrary history. It over-privileges the peaceful centres of the American order – Western Europe and East Asia – when the order defined itself also in the zones where power was most contested. It fails to account for the most consequential event in post-war American public life, the Vietnam War. Like all hegemons, Washington for long periods loosened its restraint, exerting itself violently to save face, project credibility and sustain authority, and ignored rules as it suited.
Yet talk of liberal order proliferates. It has become the lingua franca of the Atlantic security class. Such is the consistency and unity of their language, and so close is their social network through conclaves in Aspen, Davos, Munich, Harvard,
