In the last edition of Foreign Affairs, Daniel Drezner takes a long-view approach to analyzing the “current angst” over President Trump’s foreign policy approach. He writes: “Although future presidents will try to restore the classical version of U.S. foreign policy, in all likelihood, it cannot be revived. The American foundations undergirding the liberal international order are in grave danger, and it is no longer possible to take the pillars of that order for granted.”
This appears bleak, but it’s important to understand what Drezner means when he talks about the “liberal international order.” As with so much of contemporary political terminology, there is no clear-cut definition or unambiguous interpretation.
When most commentators talk of the “liberal international order,” they typically mean “U.S.-led international order.” Drezner seems to agree, writing:
The United States has had the most powerful military in the world since 1945, and its economy, as measured by purchasing power parity, became the biggest around 1870. Few people writing today about international affairs can remember a time when the United States was not the richest and most powerful country. Long-term hegemony only further embedded the United States’ advantage.
The result of this dynamic was that “regardless of the issue at hand, the United States was always viewed as a reliable leader. Its dense and enduring network of alliances and partnerships signaled that the commitments Washington made were seen as credible.” This dynamic “kept crises from becoming cataclysmic. U.S. foreign policy kept swinging back into equilibrium.”
The idea being presented seems to be that the “long-term hegemony” held by the United States has led to a type of liberal stability within the US orbit. Under the Trump administration, US foreign policy lacks “sanity,” being led by a man driven to “destroy what his predecessors spent decades preserving.”
There are specific foreign policy decisions that can be reversed with the transfer of presidential power; the elimination of the Iran deal is a powerful example of this, the long-term consequences of which remain to be seen. But redesigning the entire international order isn’t a product of one administration. President Trump is a product of the order which his predecessors helped preserve, not the harbinger of its downfall.
Drezner’s characteristic of this order, with the US steering the ship as its “reliable leader,” ignores the fact that the developed world (as well as much of the underdeveloped world) has consistently and persistently attempted to govern itself via democratic, international institutions such as the United Nations and World Court, rather than having the largest military and economic power act as captain. The latter was the case well before the United States elected an “insane” and “destructive” president.
The Iraq War, it has often been argued, was the watershed moment during which the United States began losing its credibility as the head of the “liberal international order.” While this is true, the United States’ relationship with Iraq can be viewed as a case study in unilateralism well before the invasion began in 2003.
The most obvious example of this are the UN-led WMD inspections, which had been taking place since the 1990’s. In 1998, Saddam expelled UN inspectors after the United States, alongside the UK, pursued a bombing campaign in Iraq. The second Bush administration had to demand UN inspectors leave Iraq in 2003 in order for the invasion to commence. The buildup to the war was characterized by a number of such snubs at the UN Security Council, such as Colin Powell declaring that “the Council can always go off and have other discussions,” but “we have the authority to do what we believe is necessary.”
The United States very clearly didn’t have that authority. Then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan declared the war “illegal” and “not in conformity with the UN charter…I hope we do not see another Iraq-type operation for a long time – without UN approval and much broader support from the international community.” It would be difficult for support for the war to have been any less “broad”; polling by Gallup International found that support for the war carried out “unilaterally by America and its allies” was supported by, at most, 11% of the population of any country that wasn’t America.
This disregard for international public opinion, as well as the UN, should help contextualize the Trump administration’s current stance toward Iran. Not only is the administration’s position so despised by the Europeans that they’ve taken the unusual step of attempting to circumvent US financial sanctions, but UN Secretary General Guterres has expressed “deep concern” over the United States’ withdrawal from the nuclear deal.
However, it’s not just the UN. In the 1980’s, Nicaragua went to the World Court in an attempt to stop US aid to the Contras and other paramilitary organizations within the country. In the lawsuit, Nicaragua pointed to a number of international treaties being violated by the United States, including the UN Charter, the Charter of the Organization of American States, and the Convention on Rights and Duties of States.
The Court ruled in favor of Nicaragua, charging that the United States was “in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to intervene in the affairs of another state,” and demanding that financial reparations be paid. The US ignored this ruling and continued providing aid.
In the wake of this, Nicaragua then turned to the UN Security Council, which prompted five vetoes by the United States after the other UNSC members either abstained or voted to concur with the Court. In a last-ditch effort, Nicaragua then brought the issue to the UN General Assembly which passed a resolution by a vote of 94 to 3 (with only the US, Israel, and El Salvador voting “no”) calling on the US to abide by the World Court ruling. The same vote was held a year later, with only the United States and Israel opposing.
In this instance, again, we can draw a clear line between history and today. In response to a pending request that the World Court investigate US breaches of international law during its operations in Afghanistan, the Trump administration barred all Court staff from entering the US. National Security Advisor John Bolton declared that “The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court.”
It should be clear at this point that a US-led “liberal international order” cannot also be a democratic, multilateral “liberal international order.” Whether or not that future is too idealistic to be attained, it’s becoming more clear that a US-dominated globe will soon be a thing of the past, as a UK-dominated globe is today.
However, this shouldn’t necessarily be considered apocalyptic. In considering a future where the US doesn’t play the dominant role, Drezner writes: “On an increasing number of issues, U.S. preferences would carry minimal weight, as China and Europe coordinate on a different set of rules.”
If by “different,” Drezner means a set of rules that can’t be simply ignored or denigrated by the world’s “reliable leader,” this new set of rules may not be so catastrophic, or even all that different. China and Europe both voiced their opposition to US unilateralism using the UN, rather than taking action into their own hands. While US power may be on the decline, the utilization of institutions like the UN and World Court, which the US helped to establish, may very well persist into the future.
In the case of what he calls a “collapse,” Drezner writes that the United States “would remain a great power, of course, but it would be an ordinary and less rich one.” Again, I don’t see much of an issue with this nightmare scenario. David Rieff characterized this decline in a very similar way:
America reminds me very much of Britain. I’m old enough to have known Britain in the seventies, and in Britain in the seventies there were still a hell of a lot of people who couldn’t yet wrap their mind around the fact that Britain had gone from being the empire on which the sun never set, the most important country in the world – for more than a hundred years after all – to being an important, rich, interesting, vibrant, mid-sized power. Nothing more, nothing less. The cognitive dislocation that that created in Britain among perfectly smart people – I mean these weren’t fools or sentimentalists – it took a lot for Britain.
But Britain came out the other side just fine, and so will the United States. If America is serious about injecting liberalism, humanitarianism, and pluralism into the international framework, it can continue to do so by being strategic about who and what it militarily and economically supports, which diplomatic courses of action it embarks on, and how it interacts with international forums. But first and foremost, it can stop trampling upon those ideals which it claims to promote.
Donald Trump is a continuation of a decades-long decline. Drezner’s characterization of the President as a “destructor” of the institutions “his predecessors spent decades preserving” is not only ahistorical, it’s symptomatic of a critical misunderstanding of how America’s role in the world continues to evolve.
Photo: Gage Skidmore