Patrick Porter

The False Promise of Liberal Order


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(hardback) | ISBN 9781509538683 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509538690 (epub)

      Subjects: LCSH: Trump, Donald, 1946- | Hegemony--United States. | World politics. | Liberalism. | United States--Foreign relations--20th century. | United States--Foreign relations--21st century.

      Classification: LCC JZ1480 .P664 2020 (print) | LCC JZ1480 (ebook) | DDC 327.73--dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047003 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047004

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      Many writers have dreamed up republics and kingdoms that bear no resemblance to experience.

      Niccolò Machiavelli

      I am grateful to Louise Knight at Polity for talking me into this, and to Inès Boxman who helped steer it through. Likewise, I am grateful to Chris Preble for talking me into the first version, which the Cato Institute kindly published and permitted us to draw on. And for permissions to reproduce material, thanks are due to Taylor & Francis, The Washington Quarterly, Daniel Immerwahr and Josh Shifrinson. I am grateful, for everything, to my wife Jane Rogers and to Hugh, our first-born, and to my family Brian, Muriel, Emily and Patrick, and to Frances Rogers for keeping the fires burning.

      Anyone writing about international order is in the debt of Hedley Bull and Robert Gilpin. I was never lucky enough to meet either, but hope they would have thought this book worthwhile. We are also intellectually indebted to two ‘Johns’ – Mearsheimer and Ikenberry – who, after the fall of the wall, built the theoretical floor on which the rest of us dance. The first John helped to hammer out the realist tradition that has inspired this work. And while I challenge the second John’s arguments, this book would not have been possible without his seminal body of thought.

      Lastly, a word about the United States. Much of what follows is wintry. That wintriness does not flow from hostility. To the contrary, it is offered in a spirit of tough love, in solidarity with Americans and their allies who sense that something has gone very wrong. And in this century, flattery has gotten the republic nowhere.

      In Cormac McCarthy’s noir western novel, No Country for Old Men, an honourable sheriff sees brutal, lawless days fall on his county, seemingly out of nowhere. He seeks solace by imagining a lost era of chivalry. He recalls an era when lawmen didn’t bear arms, a world that never was. In the face of inexplicable evil, his dream gives him something to hold onto and affords him dignity. It also paralyses him, making him a hapless witness to the chaos. Substitute the violent frontier for the world and the sheriff for foreign policy traditionalists, and a similar reaction is now under way in our angry days. Aghast that the time is out of joint, with the rise of President Donald Trump, populist demagogues and dangerous authoritarian regimes abroad, a group of people lament a dying order and the passing of American primacy in the world. They look back to a nobler past. Like the sheriff, they sense an end time has arrived. And like the sheriff, their invocations of a lost era cannot restore it. Invoking an imagined past impoverishes history. And it damages our capacity to act effectively under a darkening sky.

      To most of its admirers, America’s order, created around the end of the Second World War and now fading, was different because it was ‘liberal’, meaning that it was organized around freedom, consent and equality. To them, the ordering power was not an empire. It was a more benign ‘hegemon’, a word drawn from ancient Greek to mean ‘leader’. For the first time, according to this orthodoxy, the most powerful nation on earth forsook imperial aggrandizement, instead using enlightened measures to make a world safe for market democracy in which people could find emancipation. America possessed vast and unprecedented power, the hard instruments of wealth, intelligence, military force and an array of alliances. Despite being a new goliath,