In an age of demagogues, hostile great powers and trade wars, foreign policy traditionalists dream of restoring liberal international order. This order, they claim, ushered in seventy years of peace and prosperity and saw post-war America domesticate the world to its values. The False Promise of Liberal Order exposes the flaws in this nostalgic vision. The world shaped by America came about as a result of coercion and, sometimes brutal, compromise. Liberal projects – to spread capitalist democracy – led inadvertently to illiberal results. To make peace, America made bargains with authoritarian forces. Even in the Pax Americana, the gentlest order yet, ordering was rough work. As its power grew, Washington came to believe that its order was exceptional and even permanent – a mentality that has led to spiralling deficits, permanent war and Trump. Romanticizing the liberal order makes it harder to adjust to today’s global disorder. Only by confronting the false promise of liberal order and adapting to current realities can the United States survive as a constitutional republic in a plural world.
Оглавление
Patrick Porter. The False Promise of Liberal Order
Contents
Figures
Guide
Pages
Dedication
The False Promise of Liberal Order. Nostalgia, Delusion and the Rise of Trump
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Nostalgia in an End Time
The Context
The Argument
Notes
1The Idea of Liberal Order
The Order in Theory
Other Than That, Mrs Lincoln: Silences, Omissions and Ruptures
Ready for a Master: The Illiberalism of Liberal Order
Notes
2Darkness Visible: World-Ordering in Practice
An Illiberal World
Order as Hypocrisy
A Warrant to Strike
The Order at Birth
Political Economy
A Nuclear Order
Spheres of Influence
Wars for Peace
Distrusting the Order
Notes
3Rough Beast: How the Order Made Trump
Alibis and Causes
Trump as Caesarist
The Political Economy of Trump
Before the Fall
Notes
4A Machiavellian Moment: Roads Ahead
A Republic in Danger
Paths to Security
What Is to Be Done?
The Big Story
Notes
Afterword: Before Our Eyes
Notes
Index. A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
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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, the Brookings Institute or the Council on Foreign Relations, and the revolving door between think-tanks, government, foundations, 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.
