Demolishing the Liberal International Order
At a broader level, President Trumps foreign policy represents a forceful repudiation of the three key attributes of the liberal international order that has marked U.S. global hegemony since the end of World War II in 1945: alliances like NATO that treated allies as peer powers, free trade without tariff barriers, and an ironclad assurance of inviolable sovereignty for all nations, large and small. In a matter of months, Trump has crippled NATO by expressing doubt about its critical mutual-defense clause, imposed an escalating roster of punitive tariffs antithetical to free trade, and threatened to expropriate several sovereign states and territories.
Not only is his ongoing demolition of Washington's world order inflicting a good deal of pain on much of the globe from Africans and Asians denied the U.S. Agency for International Developments life-saving medicines (and potentially suffering 14 million deaths) to Eastern Europeans threatened by Russia's relentless advance but it also undercuts Americas future position on a post-Trumpian planet. His successor could, of course, try to reconcile with Canada and Mexico, placate an insulted Panamanian leadership, and even repair relations with NATO. But the presidents ongoing demolition of Washington's world system is guaranteed to do lasting, long-term damage to the country's international standing in ways that have so far eluded even informed observers.
To grasp the full extent of the harm Trump is inflicting on Americas place on this planet, its important to understand that Washington's liberal international order is nothing more than the latest iteration of the world order that every global hegemon has created as part of its apparatus of power since the fifteenth century. To understand our own present and future, its necessary to explore the nature of those world orders how they formed, how they functioned, and what their survival and destruction tell us about Americas declining imperial power.
For the past 500 years, every succeeding global hegemon Spain, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States has not only amassed wealth and military strength but also used that extraordinary power to propagate a world order that often transcended its narrow national interests. And once the inevitable imperial decline set in, a fading global hegemon often found that its world order could serve as a diplomatic safety net, extending its international influence for years, even decades beyond its moment of imperial glory.
While even the most powerful of history's empires eventually fall, such world orders entwine themselves in the cultures, commerce, and values of countless societies. They influence the languages people speak, the laws that order their lives, and the ways that so many millions of us work, worship, and even play. World orders might be much less visible than the grandeur of great empires, but they have always proven both more pervasive and more persistent.
By structuring relations among nations and influencing the cultures of the peoples who live in them, world orders can outlast even the powerful empires that created them. Indeed, some 90 empires, major and minor, have come and gone since the start of the age of exploration in the fifteenth century. In those same 500 years, however, there have been just four major world orders the Iberian age after 1494; the British imperial era that began in 1815; the Soviet system that lasted from 1945 to 1991; and Washington's liberal international order, launched in 1945, that might, based on present developments, reach its own end somewhere around 2030.
Successful global empires driven by the hard power of guns and money have also required the soft power of cultural and ideological suasion embodied in a world order. Spain's bloody conquest of Latin America soon segued into three centuries of colonial rule, softened by Catholic conversion, the spread of the Spanish language as a lingua franca, and that continents integration into a growing global economy. Once permanent mints were established in Mexico City, Lima, and Potos during the seventeenth century, Spanish galleons would carry millions of minted silver coins worth eight reales and thus known as pieces of eight across the globe for nearly three centuries, creating the worlds first common currency and making those silver coins the medium of exchange for everyone from African traders to Virginia planters.
During its century of global hegemony from 1820 to 1920, though it seldom hesitated to use military power when needed, Great Britain would also prove the exemplar par excellence of soft power, espousing an enticing political culture of fair play and free markets that it propagated through the Anglican church, the English language, an enticing literature, authoritative mass media like the global Reuters news service and the British Broadcasting Corporation, and its virtual creation of modern athletics (including cricket, football/soccer, tennis, rugby, and rowing). On a higher plane of principle, Britain's protracted anti-slavery campaign throughout much of the nineteenth century invested its global hegemony with a certain moral authority.
Similarly, the raw power of U.S. military and economic dominance after 1945 was softened by the appeal of Hollywood films, civic organizations like Rotary International, and popular sports like basketball and baseball. Just as Britain battled the slave trade for nearly a century, so Washington's advocacy of human rights lent legitimacy to its world order. While Spain espoused Catholicism, and Britain an Anglophone ethos of rights, the United States, at the dawn of its global dominion, courted allies through soft-power programs that promoted democracy, the international rule of law, and economic development.
Such world orders are not the mere imaginings of historians trying, decades or centuries later, to impose their own logic on a chaotic past. In each era, the dominant power of the day worked to reorder its world for generations to come through formal agreements with the Treaty of Tordesillas dividing much of the globe between Spain and Portugal in 1494; the 1815 Congress of Vienna (convened to resolve the Napoleonic wars) launching a full century of British global dominion; the San Francisco Conference in 1945 drafting the U.N. charter and so beginning Washington's liberal international order; and the Moscow meeting in 1957 assembling 64 communist parties at the Kremlin for a shared commitment to socialist struggle and putting the Soviet Union atop its own global order.
Just as the British imperial system was far more pervasive than its Iberian predecessor, so Washington's world order went beyond both of them and the Soviet Russian system, too, to become deeply embedded on an essentially global scale. While the 1815 Congress of Vienna was an ephemeral gathering of two dozen diplomats whose influence faded within a decade or two, the San Francisco conference of 1945 formed the United Nations, which now has 193 member states with broad international responsibilities. By the start of the twenty-first century, moreover, there were nearly 40,000 U.N.-recognized international nongovernmental organizations like the Catholic Relief Services, operating in the remotest corners of the globe.
But the similarities were perhaps more important. Note as well that both victorious powers, Great Britain and the United States, used those peace conferences to launch world orders that militated successfully against major wars among the great powers, with the pax Britannica lasting nearly a century (1815-1914) and the pax Americana persisting for 80 years and still counting.
Empires Fade but World Orders Persist
If world orders are so pervasive and persistent, why dont they last forever? Each transition from one to the next has occurred when a massively destructive cataclysm has coincided with major social or political change. The rise of the Iberian age of exploration was preceded by a century of epidemics, known as the Black Death, which killed 60% of the populations of Europe and China, devastating their respective worlds. Similarly, the British imperial era emerged when the ravages of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe coincided with the dynamism of the industrial revolution launched in England, unleashing the power of coal-fired steam energy and formal colonial rule to change the face of the globe.
After the unprecedented devastation of World War II, Washington's leadership in rebuilding and reordering a damaged planet established the current liberal international order. By the middle decades of our present century, if not before, global warming caused by fossil-fuel emissions will likely equal or surpass those earlier catastrophes on a universal scale of disaster magnitude, with the potential to precipitate the eclipse of Washington's world order. Compounding the damage, President Trumps sustained, systematic attack on Americas liberal international order its alliances, free trade, and institutions like the U.N. is only serving to accelerate the decline of a system that has served the world and this country reasonably well since 1945.
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