Not only is America withdrawing from the liberal international order, it is actively dismantling what is left: boycotting revered institutions like the UN High Commission of Human Rights, flouting free trade by imposing stiff tariffs on competitors, and precipitating headlong into military adventures.
Surely, this is all because of Trump. Or is it? Even Hilary Clinton would have pulled the US out of the Transpacific Partnership, had she won the 2016 election. When Biden replaced Trump in 2021, he continued the trade war with China and even escalated it further, dialing up the technological dimension and denying China access to advanced semiconductors.
If the next US President were someone like Vance or Rubio, we should hardly expect a radical rupture with Trump’s policies. If it were someone like Newson or Harris, we should expect a left-wing version of populism rather than a return to the old bipartisan ways. Even major European democracies like France and the UK are just one election away from turning populist.
Something is happening at a structural level, a tectonic shift. The old order appears to be dying, while the new one struggles to be born.
When was the last time that the leading state in the international system was not liberal? If your answer is 1933, think again. Germany turned totalitarian, but it wasn’t the leading state. That was the United Kingdom, or maybe the United States, and both remained liberal democracies. We must go further back to find a precedent for recent developments in the state system.
As John Ikenberry has shown, US leadership in the international order was only the latest version of liberal hegemony. Such hegemony was previously exercised by the British and, if we are to believe Immanuel Wallerstein, the Dutch before them. So, what is coming to an end is nothing less than a succession of liberal hegemonic orders spanning from the Grotian mare liberum to the Victorian pax Britannica and the postwar pax Americana.
Before mare liberum, there was no liberal hegemon. States pursued raison d’état in the political and mercantilism in the economic realm. We cannot go into details in a short editorial, but understanding such pre-liberal doctrines offers an amazing key for understanding emerging post-liberal doctrines. I have written an entire paper on this but, until it appears, let me refer you to Gilpin’s prescient thoughts in The Political Economy of International Relations.
There is no denial that liberal hegemony has been punctuated by crises, and that the modern era has been convulsed by more violence than any other period in history. Even though Britain passed the baton of liberal hegemony to the US rather peacefully, this did not happen until two world wars had shaken British confidence and upended American isolationism.
All of this was messy and violent, but it came with an assertion of progressive values sanctifying the individual and economic liberties. Normatively and philosophically, these values are as justified and in need of justification as ever, but, politically, we are now seeing a reassertion of pre-liberal doctrines, most notably mercantilism and raison d’état, under post-liberal guises.
The emerging world (dis)order is characterized not by liberal hegemony but by hegemonic contestation between increasingly illiberal great powers. Instead of promoting free trade, both superpowers pursue economic statecraft. Instead of emancipatory movements emanating from domestic and transnational civil society, we see the assertion of authoritarian political doctrines.
Of course, nobody can set the clock back by a few centuries, to where it was before the advent of liberal hegemony. The forces of capitalist markets have been unleashed; traditional authority structures have crumbled; and states bear little resemblance with the “sovereign” Leviathans and Behemoths of old. Interdependence remains high, and new technologies are rampant.
Hence, while there are parallels with the period before liberal hegemony, any déjà-vu is not a mere repetition. Instead, we find old wine in new bottles, that is, recognizable manifestations of mercantilism and raison d’état pursued under new guises like economic statecraft and “America first,” as well as new wine in old bottles, that is, policies pretending to uphold free markets and democracy in ways that have little, if anything, to do with liberal values.
Historical perspective may help us rise above the minutiae of current events and truly see the epochal shift we are experiencing. At the same time, our use of history must be “for life” rather than antiquarian, monumental, or corrosive (borrowing from the early Nietzsche’s typology). We study what happened to see what may happen, and what was done to see what we can do.