Читать книгу The False Promise of Liberal Order - Patrick Porter - Страница 9

Sudden and distressing changes have rocked the international system since the early 2010s. Hostile revisionist states are on the move, ranging from Russia’s seizure of Crimea and its covert campaigns of subversion and terror; China’s domestic repression, its expansion in the South China Sea, its bullying of foreign populations and its threats to Taiwan; and North Korea’s acquisition of a deliverable nuclear weapon. There has been sectarian bloodletting in the Middle East, mixing war with humanitarian crisis and the flight of 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, 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.

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 an awkward truth, often only in the margins of other accounts. Namely, that this is a history not simply of benign leaders and the grateful led. It is a history of resistance and imposition, of punitive force. Frequent violence at the hegemon’s discretion, to tame the world into order, is central to the history.

Many believers in liberal order do not share Boot’s enthusiasm for bloody frontiers. They think of themselves as peaceable and law-abiding. When they advocate for force, they believe they are creating a better state of peace. Yet in practice, they exhibit the liberal order’s proclivity to militarism of a kind. Our post-war order, embodied in the United Nations, was originally founded more to limit the use of force in principle – ‘the scourge of war’ – than to license it. As good Atlanticists, though, enthusiasts for liberal order often advocate military exertion under US leadership, and often without formal authorization from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), to enforce some rules, effectively, by violating others, and in ways they probably would not condone from other states. In August 2013, the liberal Economist denounced the British parliament for voting down air strikes on Syria to punish a chemical weapons (CW) atrocity, a bombing that was urgently needed to enforce a taboo and uphold a rules-based international order.⁴⁵ Opponents of war, who worried that ill-conceived military action breached rules or due process, and could inadvertently assist Islamist rebels, were branded as insular reactionaries. The assertion that, in the established order, a CW taboo is supreme and must override other considerations is ahistorical, as suggested by Washington’s earlier record in sponsoring a CW-armed Iraq against Iran. Once again, liberal consciences were persuaded that airstrikes should be used as a tool of affordable moral action, denouncing sceptics for their backwardness. Once again, they claimed a special prerogative and disregarded alternative conceptions of order. Once again, liberalism was not very liberal.

The debate over international order is difficult to have in a productive way. The issue mixes up fraught concepts: the question of liberalism, a rich and conflicted tradition; the question of the ‘international’ and how American power should shape it; and conflicting ideas of ‘order’. Liberal order is a moving target. Often it expresses not a falsifiable hypothesis but an article of faith, aspirations about American internationalism that confuse means and ends. As Damon Linker notes, the concept gets caught between two contrary views:

The liberal international order that encourages rule-following and negotiation while fostering peace and prosperity among nations is our handiwork, as is the democratic world we have nurtured around the globe. Those who oppose us in defending this order are evildoers … and we’ll seek to demonstrate this by pointing to every bad thing they’ve ever done as evidence of their inherent treachery and malevolence. We’re idealists, in other words. Moral, well-meaning, law-abiding, leading by principle and example in everything we do.

But that’s only one half of the equation. America might be unwaveringly moral, but we are also tough, ruthless, hard-nosed, realistic about the ugly ways of the world, like a sheriff toiling to establish a modest and vulnerable zone of order in a lawless land. In such a world, the ends often justify the means. When fighting our enemies, we need to be willing to do whatever it takes to prevail. We have no choice … unlike the bad guys, whose every unsavoury deed deserves to be treated as an exemplification of their wickedness, our seemingly malicious actions appear to be rare exceptions, wholly excused by the lamentable necessities that govern a fallen world.⁴⁶

Precisely because of the unswerving belief in the order’s decency and soundness, panegyrics offer shallow accounts of the crisis. They serve up glutinous reassurances, that the order has all the answers to its own problems, that what is ‘wrong’ with the order can be fixed with what is ‘right’ with it.⁴⁷ The order’s defenders offer technocratic remedies: refined institutions, fresh messaging or creative new programmes. If the order is perishing, it cannot be due to its own internal flaws. It is being assassinated, after being made vulnerable through neglect. This dictates unpromising responses, whether to write the order’s obituary, blame ‘defeatists’, or preach for its revival in the hope that the disillusioned will return to its banner. If the world is changing as profoundly as nostalgists believe, we need inquest, not exoneration.