The Left Needs to Get Serious About World Order

The liberal international order is dying, mainly at the hands of its chief architect: the United States. Donald Trump has shown nothing but contempt for the basic building blocks of international law, global institutions, norms, open trade, and multilateralism. He has, moreover, sought to realign the United States with the world’s authoritarian regimes and other white nationalist movements inside our traditional allies.

Trump has so radically re-oriented the Republican Party that U.S. allies no longer see his “America First” approach as an aberration and are preparing for a more self-help future. The world is becoming more multipolar in terms of both authoritarians in China and Russia having designs on their neighbors and regional actors like Brazil, South Africa, and India becoming increasingly weighty.

So, what next? Is there a foundation for world order other than liberalism? And what, if anything, can the United States do to support it? If the liberal international order is exhausted, what shall replace it?

MAGA dreams of a new empire in the New World, the so-called Donroe Doctrine. What does the left propose instead? “Strategic restraint,” which means less idealistic interventionism, less of a global military presence, less confrontation of great-power rivals, less bolstering of distant allies, and so on. The progressive restrainers want to empower multilateral institutions like human rights and environmental justice, demilitarize U.S. foreign policy, and avoid a return to ruthless balance-of-power multipolarity all at the same time.

Color me doubtful. The progressive restrainers’ proposal is fundamentally incoherent. They are too caught up defining themselves as “not liberal” to recognize that what they are proposing is a hollowed-out version of the liberal international order. This is not a serious vision of world order: it is a castle built on sand.

The shortcomings of progressive world order

Credit them this: progressive restrainers have worthwhile goals in many areas. There is much room for cooperation between liberals and progressives about the future of world order and the reform of U.S. foreign policy. There is a pressing need to examine how the world’s democracies can maintain some semblance of a liberal world order in which free societies can survive and counter rising authoritarian powers. New thinking is genuinely needed.

However, progressives have rarely offered realistic visions of the future of world order. Rather, they have tended to wishcast for good things while ignoring trade-offs and stubborn facts of history. Too many progressives, moreover, have proven hostile to the very notion of liberalism as a guiding light in foreign affairs.

These failures are apparent in a recent report from Yale Law School professors and Quincy Institute fellows Asli Bali and Samuel Moyn, which is a follow-up to a piece in the Guardian from earlier this year. In imagining a world based on mutual concurrence on a minimal set of principles, Bali and Moyn have devised a legalistic, hyper-rationalistic, and utterly unworkable conception of world order. They scavenge liberal principles but ignore both their success in creating a functional world order and the sad necessity for power in backing them up. 

Bali and Moyn propose an “anti-war agenda” for a multipolar world based on a minimal set of mutually-agreed-upon constraints. All states, they contend, can agree on the right to self-defense, the “inadmissibility of annexation or territorial acquisition by force,” and the unacceptability of both proxy warfare and arms sales to states that commit war crimes and other violations. 

This sounds awfully like a diet version of the liberal norms that the United States sought, however imperfectly, to hardwire into the international system following World War II. But in their dread of giving the liberal order any credence, Bali and Moyn insist that the value of their scheme is that it “does not depend on an ideological convergence.” It is the very ideological “thinness,” they claim, that would make their system workable. They believe that it would be better than the “flawed and morally bankrupt former world order” where the United States and its allies claimed the prerogative of enforcing “rules” on the rest of the world. 

Rather, Bali and Moyn assert that states, even powerful ones, will adhere to these norms not because they share liberal beliefs but because of “reciprocal self-interest.” They rely on a set of axioms to defend this point, such as “no state is safer in a world in which coercion is unconstrained because every exception claimed by one power becomes available to its rivals.” All states, they claim in lawyerly fashion, “have an interest in preventing a world in which force becomes an ordinary instrument of policy.”

This almost Kantian argument, of course, is pie-in-the-sky. Powerful authoritarian states do not care about these principles but rather about what they can get away with. Russia and China today have an obvious interest in making force and conquest ordinary instruments of policy, as do many other states, including the United States and Israel under their right-wing leaders. It is fanciful to think that Putin or Xi can be deterred by norms alone rather than by robust systems of military power and alliance. 

Asli and Moyn opine that “a multilateral order of restraint must make clear that territorial conquest cannot be normalized or rewarded.” They want to make “restraint mutually intelligible, institutionally embedded, and harder to evade.” But they reject any “centralized enforcement” of this vision, and there is no conception here of how to do this other than to norm harder. Their entire report wishes away hard cases and dodges the “how” question. At bottom, Asli and Moyn’s supposition is that once Xi reads their white paper, he’ll realize what a bad idea it all is and promptly call off preparations for an invasion of Taiwan.

The world is careening not only toward multipolarity but toward resurgent nationalism, and there’s little reason to think that revanchist nations would agree to Asli and Moyn’s compact. These authors want a more disarmed world based on “reciprocal norms” of restraint rather than a shared “moral vocabulary” of liberal values. It’s a nice idea. Has it ever worked? 

The fact that states will do expensive, counterproductive things to ensure their security is what makes great-power politics “tragic” in a self-help world. It is also the vicious dynamic that the liberal international order sought to temper (and, to an extent, succeeded in tempering) by building thicker norms about human rights and the equal rights of all states, seeking democratization, binding states together through trade, and constructing institutions to channel disputes and encourage cooperation.  

The belief that peace could emerge from states’ axiomatic interest in non-aggression is disproven by virtually all of world history. As an example, the great powers of Europe maintained their tenuous equilibrium during the Concert of Europe between 1815 and 1914 not because they agreed on the improperness of conquest, but because of fear of provoking counterbalancing coalitions—and a shared interest in crushing liberal nationalism. When the European empires detected weakness during this period, as they did in the decaying Ottoman Empire, they struck with few scruples about principles of non-aggression, and little care for the rights of smaller states. 

The liberal international order was an attempt to put international politics on a different footing by embedding states in rules-bound institutions and procedures that channeled conflict, encouraged cooperation, and deterred or punished violators. When the United Nations rallied to stop Saddam Hussein from inhaling Kuwait in 1991, for example, it was affirming both the equality of small states as a key facet of this order and the necessity of force to make this system viable. Advocates of this order also believed it was most likely to thrive in a world composed of liberal democracies. They reasoned that such regimes rarely fought with each other, sought commercial and other forms of exchange over conquest, and would accept the norms and rules that made liberal order functional.

This order required both normative concurrence among liberal democracies and significant coercive power to work. Moyn and Asli reject both of those elements in favor of a naïve and impoverished vision of mutual restraint based on nothing but the assumed Kantian rationalism of murderous dictators and populist demagogues. 

Furthermore, Asli and Moyn’s claim that “states of every size benefit from limits on coercion” ignores that a risk-reward calculation differs vastly depending on whether you are sitting in Moscow or Kyiv. It is foolhardy to think that Taiwan or Ukraine, for instance, would trust in reciprocal norms, rather than in the strength of arms, with Xi and Putin breathing down their necks. The same could be said of the many countries in the Middle East stuck between Israeli and Iranian aggression. Such states have a great stake in limits on coercion—their tormentors not so much.

The likelier outcome of Asli and Moyn’s system would be a world in which, as Thucydides wrote over two thousand years ago, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” Moyn’s unwillingness to help Ukraine, born from a belief that the United States can do no good in the world, shows that he and Asli’s larger system would really mean the abandonment of countries like Ukraine or Taiwan to the spheres of influence of rapacious autocracies.

It is also worth noting that while Asli and Moyn claim to be moving past the hypocritical liberal rules-based order, they are actually scavenging its principles. The principles of non-aggression, the rights of all states regardless of size, and the inadmissibility of conquest are all things liberal thinkers and leaders fought for starting during the Enlightenment and accelerating in the 20th century. 

The 1941 Atlantic Charter, for instance, is a foundational document in liberal international thought. As it defined U.S.-British aims vis-à-vis the Nazi menace, it included principles such as “no aggrandizement, territorial or other,” by all states, “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live,” the equality of all states, “large or small,” and the freedom of the seas. But Roosevelt and Churchill understood that liberal states were vastly more likely than authoritarian states to endorse those principles, and that power was needed to back them up in a hostile world.

Making multipolarity bearable

Asli and Moyn end up falling between two chairs. Their analysis is not realist enough, because they ignore the reality that their system would ultimately need relentless balance-of-power competition and high military spending to function. It is also not liberal or progressive enough, as they have given up on anything but the thinnest set of norms and no longer put hope in democratic alliance systems. 

This is all especially ironic coming from Moyn, who has elsewhere argued against a “liberalism of fear” which does not seek to achieve good things but only to stop bad things. He and other progressive restrainers need a much more robust vision that appreciates the reality of power and the need for thicker norms to sustain international peace.

Multipolarity will not be fun. If the democratic world continues its slide into nationalist authoritarianism, the world will relapse into the Hobbesian nightmare that the liberals of the 20th century fought, at great cost, to liberate us from. The historical conditions that made the liberal international system functional, moreover, cannot be replicated today, as Asli and Moyn rightly note.

Still, there are virtues of the old system that can be adapted to positive effect today. As hypocritical, foolish, and even brutal as the U.S.-led liberal order often was, it also enabled the greatest period of democratization and material progress the world had ever seen. The United States, for all its misdeeds, enabled the free flow of trade around the world, built institutions that stitched the world’s nations closer together, and advanced liberal norms. It provided the security and reformist guidance that enabled former foes like Japan and Germany to become flourishing democracies and allowed zones of the world like Europe to move from endless balance-of-power politics to peace and integration. 

Moyn and Asli detest the old order because it was “hypocritical,” but this is beside the point. All international orders are hypocritical, because the powerful states that shape them rarely hold themselves to account, and they all build such orders ultimately to benefit themselves. Rather than fretting about consistency as if world politics was a law school seminar, liberal order should be judged by its results, where there has been much to be happy about.

The basic insights of liberal internationalism are worth preserving and adapting to new circumstances. Legalism without power will not prevent the world from degenerating into old-school power politics, arms races, and conquest. A renewed liberalism might.

Featured Image is The San Francisco Conference, 25 April–26 June 1945. Left to right: Anthony Eden (United Kingdom), E. R. Stettinius Jr. (United States), V. M. Molotov (USSR), and T. V. Soong (China).