The End of the Liberal Rules-based International Order, Part I
I went to a talk recently given by Professor Stephen Jones, an old colleague who now runs the Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. He spoke about the situation in Ukraine, and, as always, he made me think more deeply about something that I thought I knew something about. The point that intrigued me the most was Stephen’s analysis of the reasons why Russian President Putin invaded Ukraine. I was quite familiar with Putin’s outrageous view that Ukraine is not a nation-state, and that it is a genuine part of Russia. But Putin’s view of the geopolitical situation which he believes justifies Russian action in Ukraine offers a distinct perspective:
“Like a mirror, the situation in Ukraine reflects what is going on and what has been happening in the world over the past several decades.… Our western partners, led by the United States of America, prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun. They have come to believe in their exclusivity and exceptionalism, that they can decide the destinies of the world, that only they can ever be right. They act as they please: here and there, they use force against sovereign states, building coalitions based on the principle ‘If you are not with us, you are against us.’”
The Liberal Rules-Based International Order
This perspective is a critique of the “liberal rules-based international order” which is the phrase some analysts use to describe the international system nurtured by the US at the end of World War II. At that time, the US knew that the devastation of the war, which the territory of the US did not experience, would create a massive power vacuum that could be exploited by resurgent states. As was the case in 1918, the US itself was reluctant in 1945 to insert itself as a global power, largely because the US was geopolitically disadvantaged: its allies (and potential allies such as Germany and Japan) were far away from the US while the US opponent–the USSR–was close to those allies. The Soviet explosion of the atomic bomb in August 1949, the Chinese Revolution in October 1949, and the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950 convinced many that the US had no choice but to become a global superpower. That decision was difficult for the US but was embraced by the governing elites and became the basis for the protracted Cold War which only ended in 1991.
The US, however, had a problem. The template for Great Powers throughout the period of Western domination was imperial–direct territorial control over peoples who were forced to submit. The US, as the first country to overthrow its colonial overlords in 1776, viewed itself as an anti-imperial power (despite the Spanish-American War). More importantly, after having fought two wars in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, the US was aware of the difficulties and costs of direct control.
The solution for the US was to construct a set of international organizations that could be relied upon to protect American interests and foster liberal values without direct territorial control outside of the US. Those institutions were the United Nations (to address the problem of aggression and to create a democracy of states), the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (to enforce the rules of market capitalism), and the International Court of Justice (to enforce the rules of human rights as outlined in the Univeral Declaration of Human Rights). The US had a preeminent role in all these organizations and the US was confident that its allies would support those institutions. This system of indirect control was effective for many circumstances throughout the Cold War, and, indeed, the Cold War period saw some states, like South Korea benefit from the liberal world order. US Secretary of State Blinken described this outcome in a recent speech:
“We will advance this vision guided by a sense of enlightened self-interest that has long animated U.S. leadership at its best. We helped build the international order after World War II and invested in the progress of other nations and people because we recognized that it would serve humanity’s interest, but also our own. We understood that, even as the most powerful nation on Earth, forging shared global rules – accepting certain constraints – and supporting the success of others would ultimately make the American people more prosperous, more peaceful, more secure.
“It still does. Indeed, America’s enlightened self-interest in preserving and strengthening this order has never been greater.
“Now, our competitors have a fundamentally different vision. They see a world defined by a single imperative: regime preservation and enrichment. A world where authoritarians are free to control, coerce, and crush their people, their neighbors, and anyone else standing in the way of this all-consuming goal.
“Our competitors claim that the existing order is a Western imposition, when in fact the norms and values that anchor it are universal in aspiration – and enshrined in international law that they’ve signed onto. They claim that what governments do within their borders is their business alone, and that human rights are subjective values that vary from one society to another. They believe that big countries are entitled to spheres of influence – that power and proximity give them the prerogative to dictate their choices to others.”
The Contemporary Critique of the US System
The liberal world order, however, did not benefit all states and was challenged by the Soviet bloc which slowly expanded. This bloc offered a world order based on socialist economics and people’s democracy and was described by Russian analysts as an anti-hegemonic world order, a point of view which has increasingly resonated with many states in the international system. But both the US and the Soviet Union never resolved the fundamental tension of working to establish a world order while at the same time protecting their national interest. This tension, which is one of thinking about the short term at the expense of the long term, forced both states to take actions which contradicted the aspirational rhetoric used to defend their preferred world order. Thus, the US intervened in the internal affairs of states that it feared were sympathetic to the rival world order, undermining its rhetoric about self-determination and democracy: Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; Vietnam, 1962; the Dominican Republic, 1965; and Grenada, 1983. Similarly, the Soviet Union intervened in East Germany, 1953, Hungary, 1954, Czechoslovakia, 1968, and Afghanistan, 1979. These hypocritical actions were tolerated by other states in the system since protecting the national interest is held by all states in common as the most important state objective (the world would be a different place if individuals were making decisions about consistency in moral judgments).
The willingness to tolerate hypocrisy faded more rapidly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The contest over world order ended and many in the US and Europe celebrated the end of the Cold War and led some analysts, such as Francis Fukuyama to declare the “end of history”. Importantly, the two US Presidents during and after the Soviet collapse–George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton–kept the faith in the liberal order. The US response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991 was a textbook case in working through the mechanisms of the UN and assembling a coalition of states to support the counterattack on Iraq. The Clinton Administration also worked through international institutions to formulate a response to the atrocities in the Balkans in the early 1990s. These examples suggested that the US was not going to use the opportunities afforded by the end of the Cold War to move from a rules-based world order to an imperial order.
The 2003 Invasion of Iraq and the Scuttling of the Liberal Rules-Based Order
The al Qaeda attack on the US on 11 September 2001 would have posed serious problems for any Great Power. The organization had no identifiable territory, no recognized government, and no uniformed military. It was not clear to many analysts that there was any effective military response to the attack. Nonetheless, the US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and remained there until 2023. Most states in the world doubted whether the US could eliminate al Qaeda, but few states openly objected to the invasion, since, once again, all states share the common principle of self-defense. The US decided to escalate the conflict by invading Iraq on the pretense that the leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was prepared to give al Qaeda “weapons of mass destruction”. This decision ultimately proved to be both tragic and unacceptable to most of the world.
The US President at the time, Geroge W. Bush, was able to persuade Great Britain and some other states to join the fight in Iraq, but additional assistance was not necessary to topple the government of Iraq and Hussein was overthrown after only three weeks of fighting. The country was plunged into a civil war in which US and coalition forces found themselves without any Iraqi allies on the ground.
It is safe to say that the invasion of Iraq was one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the US since 1945. US and coalition troops left Iraq in 2011, having failed to stabilize the internal politics of Iraq. There were many strategic consequences of the failed invasion, but those consequences are not the subject of this particular post. Rather, the failed invasion raised serious doubts in the halls of many states about the commitment of the US to the liberal rules-based international order.
First, for the first time the US used military force without the sanction of an international organization. The US had always been careful to pay at least lip service to international organizations whenever it intervened in another country. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy got the approval of the Organization of American States as it did in the Dominican Republic intervention in 1965. The US argued that the Southeast Treaty Organization (SEATO) authorized its intervention in Vietnam. Even in the invasion of Grenada, US President Reagon claimed to have received a request for the intervention from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States. There were a number of UN Security Council Resolutions condemning Saddam Hussein for a variety of offenses, but not a single one of those resolutions–even the last one, Resolution 1441–had the critical sentence: “Therefore, the Security Council authorizes the use of force to bring about international peace and stability”.
In the end, the Bush Administration assembled what it called “the coalition of the willing” but the failure to obtain authorization of an international organization blew apart the pretense of a “rules-based” order.
Second, the invasion failed to produce anything remotely like a democratic outcome. Indeed, the US found itself in the position of supporting minority populations like the Sunnis and Kurds and not the dominant population demographic of Shiite Muslims. The Sunni population had been protected by Saddam Hussein and, without his protection, that demographic produced a Sunni organization–what the US called ISIS–that proved to be as morally reprehensible as al Qaeda.
Third, the US violated many precepts of the human rights regime it had championed since 1945. It found itself using techniques such as waterboarding which is universally held as torture. The photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison shocked many in the world and American citizens were forced to view the graphic evidence of techniques that the US had traditionally condemned. The US also imprisoned what it claimed were combatants in the “war” on terror at the US military base in Guantanamo, Cuba. These individuals were held, not under the terms usually afforded to prisoners of war but without access to counsel or any of the normal processes to assure fair treatment.
Unfortunately, many states violate human rights but the US is distinctive among most countries in the world by the amount of attention it pays to the issue of human rights. For example, the US regularly condemns the treatment of Uighurs in China, the treatment of the Rohingya in Burma, and the issue of hijab in Iran. Moreover, the US has made progress in addressing its own domestic record on human rights, particularly in terms of protecting the rights of minorities such as African-Americans and the rights of women and people who identify as LBGTQ. Moreover, the US stance on human rights is one of the most attractive messages to people all over the world.
Thus, the behavior of the US in its war on terror eroded its distinctive role in world affairs. And human rights are the most differentiating component of “liberal” in the liberal rules-based order since many other countries embrace democracy and market capitalism. The US lost its voice on human rights and that voice has yet to recover. Since 2003 the singular attractiveness of the liberal rule-based order has been diminished and other states are articulating alternative orders which have resonated with other countries in the world.
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