universities and media commentary, that the coalition of those who call for a return to a liberal order can be regarded as a class in itself, with its own dialect.28
In our age of complex realignment, the question of order also cuts diagonally across old lines, creating new coalitions. Hawkish internationalist Republicans and Democrats make common cause against Trump and the order’s enemies.29 Neoconservatives, committed to heroic greatness, subdivide on the question of liberalism, some enlisting in bipartisan resistance against Trump, others joining his administration.30 The question even divides the Trumpists. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared the pursuit of a new liberal order based on the principle of national sovereignty, after which there emerged a starker conception of primacy, defined as ‘We’re America, Bitch’.31 A group of the president’s ministers, who chafe at some elements of the liberal order – for example, adherence to institutions – have tried to tilt their erratic boss back into the orthodoxy of US hegemonic leadership. This is not a simple story.
Advocates of the ‘liberal order’ believe it was a good thing, and worth defending.32 It was, they argue, a constellation of ‘bargains, institutions and social purposes’33 created under the leadership of the post-war USA. As the dominant state, with its favourable geography, economic and demographic size and military preponderance, America shaped ‘the rules of the game by which international politics is played, the intellectual frameworks employed by many states, and the standards by which behaviour is judged to be legitimate’.34 For admirers, this was a profound project that rewired the world. They periodize it as a more-or-less continuous set of arrangements that lasted for more than seventy years from the Allied victory in 1945. America created a constitutional order as opposed to unchecked power, a system that was fundamentally consensual, benign and open. The order’s longevity, stability and attraction rested on these liberal ideological foundations. This system constituted a harmony of interests, in that it was both good for America and good for the world.
Traditionalists share a vocabulary, historical reference points and logic, though what they mean precisely by ‘order’ varies. Some use the term loosely as a proxy for the general benevolence of American primacy. Others make more specific and ambitious claims about how that world once worked. All defend liberal order as a historical creation that rescued a world from depression, totalitarianism, world war and genocide. Most propose it as a model for the future, if only others would share their vision. Their pessimism varies. Some argue that the order is collapsing with America’s ‘retreat’ and the rise of barbaric forces at home and abroad, and that the best we can do is salvage what we can. Others hope that even as an internal schism divides the West, the order created by America can outlive its principal architect.
In opposition, there are sceptics.35 Most of these argue that liberal order is a false promise, a master concept that will do more to hinder than to help us pick our way through the chaos. They note the gap between nostalgia and history, and that the post-war world was never ‘whole’. There may be ‘islands of liberal order, but they are floating in a sea of something quite different’.36 Most favour a more restrained grand strategy – less militarized, more accommodating, less driven to expansion. Some are isolationists, favouring bringing America home from its overseas commitments. Many are not – including this author. In their shared opposition to centrist orthodoxy, sceptics derive from a mixed and overlapping grouping of academic realists, anti-war conservatives and progressive-leftist internationalists, though there is also a group of primacists who maintain that the USA should still pursue dominance abroad but without extravagant projects to export democratic capitalism. In common, they challenge visions of liberal order as a once-achieved fact to which we can return. Such memories are ahistorical, and therefore no answer to the present predicament. Indeed, they are part of the problem. As a ‘mytho-history’ that provides an account of origin and a guide to action, the false memory of liberal order obscures what power politics involves. And it turns attention away from where it can lead, especially when the powerful inhale their own mythology. The task should not be to adapt, reform, refresh, repackage or rebrand this vision. That vision put the USA where it is now: saddled by unsustainable debt, stifled by excessive and unaccountable state power, struggling through multiple failed wars, on collision course with rivals in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, and helmed by Trump. The prudent response is instead to correct, or at least restrain, its flaws.
Beyond that baseline argument, sceptics are a more heterogenous lot. They disagree with one another about whether there really was a liberal order or whether there can be. Some argue there was, at least once the USA become the unipolar primate and, unfettered, ran amok. Others celebrate liberal progress but claim that American hegemony had little to do with it. Still others complain that there ought to have been such an order, but it was absent. They call on Washington to practise what it preaches and obey the rules it insists others obey, suggesting that we could have such an order if only the hypocrisy were to end.37 Thus there are unresolved arguments within the sceptics’ camp about whether liberal order is desirable or possible.
Ideas about order matter and have weighty policy implications. Just as material power enables or forecloses certain choices, so ideas condition and constrain a country’s grand strategic decisions. Those who lament the fall of the liberal order are saying, in effect, that some ideas are illegitimate and should be off the table. They worry that populism and isolationism endanger traditional ideas that were once dominant, leading America to abandon its manifold commitments overseas. When they call for the reclamation of the old order, they also call for the perpetuation of American primacy. By contrast, I argue that the exaggerated notion of the liberal order and its imminent collapse is one of the myths of empire that helped create the current crisis.
Today’s politics is restoration politics, the politics of promising to resuscitate lost orders. Strongmen, demagogic populists, seek authority by claiming to speak for the true virtuous people against illegitimate alien elites, vowing to bring lost orders back. They will ‘make America great again’, ‘take back control’, or return jobs, industries, sovereign borders and national pride.38 And they are not the only ones to harken back. Proponents of liberal order see their cause as forward-looking and scold voters and political realists alike for being backward-looking.39 Yet they too traffic in nostalgia. In George Packer’s elegy for the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke, a curator of the Pax Americana, his hero weeps at the 1949 musical South Pacific for the loss of a ‘feeling that we could do anything’, an era ‘when we had gone to the most distant corners of the globe and saved civilization’.40 Cautioning against being ‘backward-looking’, such minds also call for the revival of a system that was founded in atypical and impermanent conditions seventy years ago, under a different distribution of power, an exceptionalism based on America’s technocratic capacity ‘to innovate and solve hard problems’.41 Former Senator, Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton accused Trump voters of ‘looking backward’. But she too appealed to a romanticized past, a ‘long-standing bipartisan tradition of global leadership rooted in a preference for cooperating over acting unilaterally, for exhausting diplomacy before making war, and for converting old adversaries into allies rather than making new enemies’.42 The history Clinton praises was far more mixed. Historically, the USA often acted unilaterally, waged preventive war – and considered doing so – before exhausting all options, including in Iraq in 2003 with Clinton’s supporting vote, and sustained enmities from Cuba’s Fidel Castro to the Iranian Ayatollahs.43
At times, self-identified liberal traditionalists are risibly nostalgic. The writings of hawkish public intellectual Max Boot exhibit the nostalgia’s imperial turn. Boot champions ‘liberal order’, scolding fellow Republicans that ‘nostalgia isn’t a foreign policy’. Yet he also advises Washington to find wartime inspiration in historical campaigns to pacify frontiers, borrowing his title from Rudyard Kipling’s poem urging America to take up the ‘white man’s burden’.44 Boot’s explicit reverence for empire and its thirst for vengeance, his insensitivity to the genocidal and racial character of his subject, is an extreme case. It also reveals
