Reprinted with permission from The Realist Review.
To hear an American President, the supposed leader of the self-styled free world, no matter how disingenuously, declare that the age of nation building is over, and deliver a thunderous denunciation of the nation building project, its courtier class, and their influence on world affairs in a foreign country must be a particular low moment for the liberal internationalist. What is the world order defending if not the missionary drive to expand freedom (and markets) to all around the world, regardless of relevance to strategic doctrine? Even at its most ridiculous, the Trump Administration’s farce of a month-long ineffective war in Yemen showed someone willing to stop a failed intervention in the matter of weeks, rather than the Washington DC standard time frame of decades.
Liberal internationalists are more of a symptom than a cause of imperial decline, but in their hermetically sealed bubble where dissent is seen as discourteous and uncouth, there is an undeniable feedback loop. An ideology constructed to justify one of the many in a long line of rapacious imperial orders became so ingrained upon the public consciousness that it indoctrinated the professional managerial class. The very people who are supposed to be intelligent enough to know the difference between propaganda for the masses and real policy actually became the biggest marks. The soothing bromides of Aaron Sorkin lulled generations of aspiring policymakers to sleep about the dangers of hubris. As the historical scholar Ronald P. Toby once stated:
“Diplomacy can help establish a state, intelligence services can help defend it, and the skillful construction and manipulation of neighbors abroad can be molded into a language that transcends and transforms reality into the mechanism for the maintenance of some desired world view. Hence it can serve to perpetuate the illusion of the ideologies which support the state. The danger, of course, is that such illusions and ideologies may survive beyond comfort beyond the point of peril, when they become too far removed from their context, so atavistic that they prevent the state from responding effectively to the new truths and new environments.”
The liberal international order was so global, so omnipresent, and so apparently successful that it created a genuine caste of true believers. Disproportionately represented in media professions, this class came to view the American Empire as inseparable from the American Republic, and its interests not that of a country with specific territory, but of the entire human race (as determined by Americans). Over time, elite overproduction meant that such people were favored in recruitment as their loyalty to the establishment was more unquestioning and made them more desirable appointees in a sea of applicants, and so the bureaucracy moved away from scholarship or pragmatism into something more representative of a kind of clergy.
It is they who now provide the institutional inertia pushing against necessary changes as the United States finally gives up the doomed enterprise of total global hegemony and pivots into something more resembling a normal great power. Using airport bookstore intellectuals to provide cover, these euphoric courtiers argue that endless defense contracts and catering to foreign lobbies was all for the elevation of the human race towards a promised future. Liberalism had and would continue to uplift humanity if only more people believed in it. Locality and context were nothing but unfortunate and barbaric practices, heathens standing in the way of the One True Religion.
But with the recognition of a multipolar reality, all of that is now unquestionably over. The U.S. share of the world economy and especially industrial output is smaller than it was when the Liberal International Order was first constructed in 1945. And it is material reality, not aspirational belief, that dictates power. As the world becomes more polydirectional, so too will the lack of a hegemon inevitably lead to the loss of even the pretence of a hegemonic value system based on the North Atlantic’s particular civic practices. To yearn for a return to a world where the many nations of Earth had to care about the latest trends emanating from The Atlantic’s latest garden party event is nothing but nostalgia, backwards looking and senile. Nostalgia for an age that never existed, as Jello Biafra would have put it.
So where do the liberal internationalists go from here? If recent comments from former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan are any indication, they are off to a rough start. To hear someone who spent most of his tenure in office effectively ignoring if not thwarting diplomatic solutions to every crisis, while condemning anyone else for even trying a different path forward, it seems likely that the neoconservative turn of Resistance Liberalism could be trying to make a comeback.
But that world is over, and everyone who is not a liberal internationalist seems to know it. Most voters want less interventionism, not more. And the younger the voter the less faith they have in the pieties of the bipartisan position on foreign affairs. Many democrats speak out against adhering to the old model, but are often treated with disdain by their own media apparatus for daring to do so. The Harris’ campaign’s alliance with the Cheney family probably doomed it electorally. Meanwhile, China’s growing military power, and the perpetual trail of disasters left in America’s War on Terror show that the more restrained country often comes out on top, a lesson that would be apparent in even a brief study of America’s own earlier history vis-à-vis Europe. So while many former bipartisan elites will inevitably push for (personally profitable to them) endless war, it is unlikely to serve as a viable comeback strategy with the masses in the near future.
Another possibility, albeit one for a tiny and terminally online minority that identifies with rather than being part of the elite, is violent extremism. Strange as it is to speak of pro-centrist extremism, as the overton window moves further and further away from post-Cold War centrism, and recognizing their declining influence, the possibility that liberal internationalists will see the resumption of normal diplomacy between great powers as some kind of creeping ‘authoritarian axis’ and turn to support for domestic terrorism cannot be discounted. Numerous Americans fight in foreign armies, attaching themselves to radical causes that posit some greater trans-national and transcendent goal, be it Zionism, the Kurdish project, or Ukraine. Such groups could provide members capable of training others to become a kind of reverse Timothy McVeigh. Arguably, it has already happened in the case of Ryan Routh, Trump’s would be assassin with adamant pro-Ukraine views. Already there is a bizarre cross-pollination of people sympathetic to the neo-nazi Azov Battalion and the pieties of the liberal international order, something that likely would not surprise Robert Paxton, the scholar of fascism who postulated that it was the crisis stage mode of a failing (and often liberal) elite-identified substratum of society. Though, once again, due to the growing unpopularity of interventionism, any such desperate action on behalf of the radicalized bien pensant will only make their cause even more unpopular with the public.
Where does this leave sane liberal internationalists? Besides, of course, admitting that their worldview is both unfit and unreasonable for understanding foreign policy in any post-hegemonic era? There is only one constructive option. If they are so concerned that liberal values are under threat then they must reinvigorate such values at home and show their eminent utility. They must roll back the Patriot Act, the warrantless wiretapping, the crackdowns on speech criticizing Israel, police militarization, and corporate capture of the economy. And they must acknowledge that all of these policies were pushed predominantly by ‘sensible’ centrists, the single biggest constituency of the liberal internationalist cause.
Liberalism, in its older and wiser form, gave room for many different ways of being, both at home and abroad. Diversity and tolerance thrive when one does not fear constant attack by the other, be they liberal or not. America once understood this, indeed, it was a core part of the founding of the country itself. The traditions are there, and should they be actually practiced at home, maybe it would be easier to make their case more effectively abroad as not a universal model, but a case study that others could selectively harvest from should they so desire. The original liberals, reacting to the fanatic sectarianism of the 17th Century, scorned missionary activity and sought self-improvement and a grounding in what was possible in the material world. Perhaps they could be convinced today to return to those superior roots again.
The alternatives, do double down into an alliance with the neoconservative movement and its decades of ruination inflicted upon the world, or to pivot towards reactive extremism, will only make their own and everyone else’s situation worse. But it will hardly be the first time, nor the last, that an apocalyptic ideology sought to bring down a society for failing to live up to its Platonic ideals.
Dr. Christopher Mott is a Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy; an expert in Grand Strategy and Geopolitics; and a former researcher and desk officer at the U.S. Department of State.
