John Mearsheimer 注定失敗 自由國際秩序的興衰

注定失敗 自由國際秩序的興衰

Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order 

John J. Mearsheimer

https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/43/4/7/12221/Bound-to-Fail-The-Rise-and-Fall-of-the-Liberal

International Security (2019) 43 (4): 7–50. 2019年4月1日

https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00342

摘 要

冷戰後建立的自由國際秩序在 2019 年崩潰了。它從一開始就存在缺陷，因此注定要失敗。自由民主在全球的傳播——建立這一秩序的關鍵——因強調自決的民族主義而麵臨強烈抵製。一些目標國家還出於安全原因抵製美國促進自由民主的努力。此外，自由秩序要求各國將重大決策權下放給國際機構，並允許難民和移民輕鬆跨越國界，這也引發了問題。然而，現代民族國家重視主權和民族認同，當機構變得強大且邊界變得模糊時，問題必然會隨之而來。此外，自由秩序不可或缺的超全球化在自由民主國家的中下層階級中造成了經濟問題，引發了對該秩序的強烈反對。最後，自由秩序加速了中國的崛起，幫助該體係從單極轉變為多極。自由國際秩序隻有在單極體製下才有可能實現。新的多極世界將有三個現實主義秩序：一個促進合作的薄弱國際秩序，以及兩個有邊界的秩序——一個由中國主導，另一個由美國主導——它們準備在彼此之間展開安全競爭。

結 論

美國及其盟友在冷戰期間建立了一個強大的秩序，但它既不是國際秩序，也不是自由秩序。這是一個有界秩序，其主要目的是與蘇聯主導的對手有界秩序進行安全競爭。這兩個秩序的核心都是現實主義的，不是自由主義或共產主義的。冷戰後單極世界的到來，讓勝利的西方——以美國為首——開始建立一個真正的自由國際秩序。人們希望它能成為一個和平繁榮世界的幫手。

在 20 世紀 90 年代和新世紀的頭幾年，自由秩序似乎將按預期發揮作用，並將長期存在。倡導者和設計者可以指出許多成功之處，同時也承認一些失敗之處。但從 2005 年左右開始，該秩序開始遇到嚴重問題，這些問題隨著時間的推移而成倍增加，以至於它開始崩潰。這一結果本應是可以預見的，因為該秩序本身就蘊含著自我毀滅的種子，因此注定會早晚失敗。

美國及其盟友試圖建立自由國際秩序，但麵臨三個主要問題。首先，它要求體係中的自由國家，尤其是美國，推行高度修正主義和野心勃勃的政權更迭政策，而在一個強調主權和自決的民族主義仍然是一股強大力量的時代，這一政策幾乎注定會失敗。該政策還受到全球和地區層麵的權力平衡政治的阻礙。

其次，通過推動人員跨境自由流動和將重大決策權下放給國際機構，前任

自由秩序的擴張在自由國家內部造成了重大的政治問題。其結果往往與民族認同和主權的信念相衝突，而民族認同和主權對現代民族國家的大多數公民來說都非常重要。

第三，盡管一些人和國家從超全球化中受益，但它最終在自由民主國家內部造成了重大的經濟和政治問題，最終導致對自由國際秩序的支持嚴重減弱。與此同時，超全球化帶來的經濟活力幫助中國迅速成為一個大國，而俄羅斯則在大約同一時間重新確立了自己的大國地位。全球力量平衡的這種轉變結束了單極世界，而單極世界是自由世界秩序的先決條件。

在新興的多極世界中，可能會出現一個現實主義的國際秩序，它將關注管理世界經濟，並促進和維護軍備控製協議。該秩序的重點將放在促進國家間合作上。此外，中國和美國可能會主導有限製的秩序，這將有助於推動中國及其盟友與美國及其盟友之間幾乎肯定會發生的安全競爭。這種競爭既有經濟層麵的，也有軍事層麵的。

美國在拋棄自己辛辛苦苦建立的自由國際秩序時應該如何行動？首先，它應該抵製任何繼續試圖通過政權更迭在全球強行傳播民主的誘惑。由於美國將被迫與中國和俄羅斯進行權力平衡政治，其在國外進行社會工程的能力將受到極大限製。然而，重塑世界的誘惑將永遠存在，因為美國如此熱切地相信自由民主的優點。但它應該抵製這種誘惑，因為進行自由主義十字軍東征肯定會導致嚴重的麻煩。

其次，美國應尋求最大限度地發揮其在構成新興國際秩序的經濟機構中的影響力。這樣做對於在不斷變化的全球權力分配中保持盡可能有利的地位至關重要。畢竟，經濟實力是軍事實力的基礎。華盛頓必須不允許中國主導這些機構，並利用由此產生的影響力以犧牲美國為代價獲得權力。

第三，美國決策者應確保建立一個能夠遏製中國擴張的強大有界秩序。這項任務要求建立諸如跨太平洋夥伴關係之類的經濟機構以及類似於冷戰時期北約的亞洲軍事聯盟。在此過程中，美國應該不遺餘力地將俄羅斯拉出中國的軌道，並將其納入美國主導的秩序。

總之，現在是美國外交政策機構認識到自由國際秩序是一項沒有前途的失敗事業的時候了。在可預見的未來，重要的秩序是現實主義秩序，必須為美國利益服務。

簡介
到 2019 年，自由國際秩序顯然陷入了困境。支撐它的板塊正在移動，幾乎無力修複和拯救它。事實上，這一秩序從一開始就注定要失敗，因為它蘊含著自我毀滅的種子。

自由國際秩序的垮台讓建立這一秩序並從中受益的西方精英感到震驚。1 這些精英堅信這一秩序曾經是、現在仍然是促進全球和平與繁榮的重要力量。他們中的許多人將其垮台歸咎於唐納德·特朗普總統。畢竟，他在 2016 年競選總統時表達了對自由秩序的蔑視；自上任以來，他一直在推行似乎旨在摧毀它的政策。

然而，認為自由國際秩序陷入困境僅僅是因為特朗普的言論或政策，那就錯了。事實上，還有更根本的問題在起作用，這解釋了為什麽特朗普能夠成功挑戰一個幾乎得到西方外交政策精英普遍支持的秩序。本文的目的是確定自由世界秩序陷入大麻煩的原因，並確定將取代它的國際秩序類型。

我主要提出三組論點。首先，由於現代世界各國以各種方式緊密相連，秩序對於促進有效和及時的互動至關重要。國際秩序有多種類型，哪一種類型出現主要取決於全球權力分配。但當體係是單極體係時，唯一一極的政治意識形態也很重要。自由國際秩序隻能在單極體係中出現，其中主導國家是自由民主國家。

其次，自二戰以來，美國領導了兩種不同的秩序。冷戰秩序有時被錯誤地稱為“自由國際秩序”，既不是自由的也不是國際的。這是一個主要局限於西方的有界秩序，在其所有關鍵維度上都是現實主義的。它具有某些與自由秩序一致的特征，但這些屬性是基於現實主義邏輯的。另一方麵，美國主導的後冷戰秩序是自由的和國際的，因此與美國在冷戰期間主導的有界秩序有著根本的不同。

第三，後冷戰時期的自由國際秩序注定要崩潰，因為其所依賴的關鍵政策存在嚴重缺陷。在全球傳播自由民主對於建立這樣的秩序至關重要，但這不僅極其困難，而且往往會毒害與其他國家的關係，有時還會導致災難性的戰爭。目標國家內部的民族主義是促進民主的主要障礙，但權力平衡政治也發揮著重要的阻礙作用。

此外，自由秩序傾向於優先考慮國際機構而不是國內考慮，以及其對多孔甚至開放邊界的堅定承諾，對包括美國單極國家在內的主要自由國家本身產生了有害的政治影響。

這些政策在主權和民族認同等關鍵問題上與民族主義發生衝突。由於民族主義是地球上最強大的政治意識形態，每當兩者發生衝突時，它總是勝過自由主義，從而從根本上破壞了秩序。

此外，超全球化試圖將全球貿易和投資壁壘降至最低，導致整個自由世界失業、工資下降、收入不平等加劇。它還使國際金融體係變得不那麽穩定，導致金融危機頻發。這些麻煩隨後演變成政治問題，進一步削弱了對自由秩序的支持。

超全球化經濟以另一種方式破壞了秩序：它幫助單極國家以外的國家變得更加強大，這可能會破壞單極並終結自由秩序。這就是中國崛起所發生的事情，中國崛起與俄羅斯實力的複蘇一起結束了單極時代。新興的多極世界將由一個基於現實主義的國際秩序組成，該秩序將在管理世界經濟、處理軍備控製和處理氣候變化等全球公域問題方麵發揮重要作用。除了這一新的國際秩序之外，美國和中國還將領導有界秩序，這些秩序將在經濟和軍事領域相互競爭。2

本文的其餘部分組織如下。首先，我解釋了“秩序”一詞的含義以及為什麽秩序是國際政治的重要特征。其次，我描述了不同類型的秩序以及自由國際秩序將出現的情況。與此相關的是，我在第三部分研究了國際秩序興起和衰落的原因。在第四部分，我描述了不同的冷戰秩序。在接下來的三節中，我講述了自由國際秩序的曆史。然後，在接下來的四節中，我解釋了它失敗的原因。在倒數第二節中，我討論了多極化下的新秩序將會是什麽樣子。結論簡要總結了我的論點並提出了一些政策建議。

什麽是秩序？秩序為何重要？
“秩序”是一組有組織的國際機構，有助於管理成員國之間的互動。3 秩序還可以幫助成員國與非成員國打交道，因為秩序不一定包括世界上的每個國家。此外，秩序可以包括具有區域或全球範圍的機構。大國創造和管理秩序。

國際機構是秩序的基石，實際上是大國製定並同意遵守的規則，因為它們認為遵守這些規則符合它們的利益。這些規則規定了可接受的行為類型，禁止了不可接受的行為形式。4 不出所料，大國製定這些規則是為了滿足自己的利益。但當這些規則不符合主導國家的切身利益時，這些國家要麽忽視它們，要麽重寫它們。例如，在2003年伊拉克戰爭之前，小布什總統曾多次強調，即使美國的入侵違反了國際法，“美國也將盡一切努力確保國家安全……我不會坐以待斃，任由危險積聚。”5

秩序可以包含不同類型的機構，包括北大西洋公約組織（NATO）、《不擴散核武器條約》（NPT）或《華沙公約》等安全機構，以及國際貨幣基金組織（IMF）、北美自由貿易協定、經濟合作與發展組織和世界銀行等經濟機構。它還可以包括處理環境問題的機構，例如應對氣候變化的《巴黎協定》，以及更多層麵的機構，例如歐盟（EU）、國際聯盟和聯合國（UN）。

秩序在現代國際體係中不可或缺，原因有二。首先，它們在一個高度相互依賴的世界中管理國家間關係。6 各國從事大量的經濟活動，這促使它們建立機構和規則來規範這些互動並使其更有效率。但這種相互依賴並不局限於經濟事務；它還包括環境和健康問題。例如，一個國家的汙染必然會影響鄰國的環境，而全球變暖的影響是普遍的，隻能通過多邊措施來應對。此外，致命疾病不需要護照就可以跨越國界，正如 1918-20 年致命的流感大流行所表明的那樣。

各國在軍事領域也相互聯係，這導致它們結成聯盟。為了給對手展示一種強大的力量，

為了在威懾失效時保持強大的威懾力或有效作戰，盟國將受益於製定規定各成員國軍隊如何行動以及如何相互協調的規則。協調的必要性被放大，因為現代軍隊擁有種類繁多的武器，但並非所有武器都與盟國的武器兼容。想想北約和華沙條約組織軍隊擁有的各種各樣的武器，更不用說協調這些聯盟內部各戰鬥部隊的行動有多困難。冷戰期間，兩個超級大國都維持著高度製度化的聯盟——事實上是高度製度化的秩序——這並不奇怪。

其次，秩序在現代國際體係中不可或缺，因為它們幫助大國以符合大國利益的方式管理弱國的行為。7 具體而言，最強大的國家設計機構來約束弱國的行為，然後對它們施加巨大壓力，迫使它們加入這些機構並無論如何遵守規則。然而，這些規則往往有利於體係中的弱國。

這種現象的一個很好的例子是超級大國在冷戰期間努力建立核不擴散機製。為此，1968 年蘇聯和美國製定了《不擴散核武器條約》，該條約實際上規定任何沒有核武器的成員國都不得獲得核武器。當然，莫斯科和華盛頓的領導人不遺餘力地讓盡可能多的國家加入《不擴散核武器條約》。超級大國也是 1974 年核供應國集團成立的主要推動力，該集團旨在對向沒有核武器但可能試圖在市場上購買核武器的國家出售核材料和技術施加重大限製。

然而，如果強國認為這樣做不符合它們的利益，那麽構成秩序的機構就不能強迫它們遵守規則。換句話說，國際機構沒有自己的生命力，因此沒有權力告訴主要國家該做什麽。它們隻是大國的工具。然而，規則是任何製度的本質，有助於管理國家的行為，大國大多數時候都遵守規則。

底線是，在一個多方麵相互依存的世界中，一套規則體係對於降低交易成本和幫助開展國家之間發生的眾多互動是必不可少的。美國太平洋軍事部隊前指揮官哈裏·哈裏斯海軍上將將自由國際秩序稱為“全球操作係統”，抓住了這一點。8

秩序的類型
國際體係中的秩序有三個重要區別。第一個區別是國際秩序和有界秩序。一個秩序要想成為國際秩序，就必須包括世界上所有的大國。理想情況下，它將包含體係中的每個國家。相比之下，有界秩序由一組成員有限的機構組成。它們不包括所有大國，而且它們的範圍通常是區域性的。在大多數情況下，它們由一個大國主導，盡管兩個或多個大國有可能形成一個有界秩序，隻要至少一個大國不參與其中。簡而言之，國際秩序和有界秩序都是由大國創造和運行的。

國際秩序主要關注促進國家之間的合作。具體來說，它們有助於促進體係內大國之間的合作，或促進世界上幾乎所有國家之間的合作。另一方麵，有界秩序的主要目的是允許競爭對手大國之間進行安全競爭，而不是促進它們之間的合作。盡管如此，領導有界秩序的大國會努力促進成員國之間的合作，必要時還會脅迫它們。在有界秩序內進行高水平的合作對於與對立大國進行安全競爭至關重要。最後，國際秩序是當代國際政治的一個不變特征，而有界秩序則不是。隻有現實主義的國際秩序才會伴隨著有界秩序。

第二個主要區別涉及大國可以組織的不同國際秩序：現實主義、不可知論或意識形態（包括自由主義）。哪種秩序占主導地位主要取決於大國之間的權力分配。關鍵問題是該體係是兩極、多極還是單極。如果是單極，占主導地位的國家的政治意識形態對於確定形成的國際秩序類型也很重要。然而，在兩極和多極中，政治意識形態

大國的利益在很大程度上無關緊要。

現實主義秩序
如果體係是兩極或多極的，國際秩序及其組成機構將是現實主義的。原因很簡單：如果世界上有兩個或兩個以上的大國，它們別無選擇，隻能按照現實主義的要求行事，相互進行安全競爭。他們的目標是以犧牲對手為代價獲得權力，但如果這不可能，他們要確保權力平衡不會對他們不利。在這種情況下，意識形態考慮服從於安全考慮。即使所有大國都是自由國家，情況也是如此。9 盡管如此，競爭對手大國有時也有合作的動機。畢竟，他們在一個高度相互依存的世界中運作，他們肯定會有一些共同的利益。

在現實主義世界中並肩運作的有界秩序和國際秩序有助於對立的大國在彼此之間競爭和合作。具體而言，大國建立自己的有界秩序，以幫助彼此進行安全競爭。相反，它們組織國際秩序以促進它們之間以及與其他國家之間的合作。構成國際秩序的機構非常適合幫助大國在具有共同利益時達成協議。盡管大國關心合作，但它們仍然是競爭對手，其關係的核心是競爭。即使大國通過國際機構相互合作，權力平衡的考慮也始終在發揮作用。特別是，沒有一個大國會簽署削弱其權力的協議。

構成這些現實主義秩序的機構——無論是國際的還是有邊界的——有時可能具有與自由主義價值觀一致的特征，但這並不是該秩序是自由主義的證據。這些特征恰好從權力平衡的角度來看也是有意義的。例如，有邊界秩序中的關鍵經濟機構可能旨在促進成員國之間的自由貿易，這並不是因為自由主義的考量，而是因為經濟開放被認為是在該秩序內產生經濟和軍事力量的最佳方式。事實上，如果放棄自由貿易並轉向更封閉的經濟體係具有良好的戰略意義，那麽在現實主義秩序中就會發生這種情況。

不可知論和意識形態秩序
如果世界是單極的，國際秩序就不可能是現實主義的。單極隻有一個大國，因此從定義上講，大國之間不可能存在安全競爭，而這是任何現實主義世界秩序的必要條件。因此，唯一的一極幾乎沒有理由建立一個有界秩序。畢竟，有界秩序主要是為了與其他大國進行安全競爭而設計的，這在單極中是無關緊要的。盡管如此，在非現實主義國際秩序中，一些機構可能在範圍上是區域性的，而其他機構在成員方麵將是真正的全球性的。然而，這些區域機構都不會捆綁在一起形成有界秩序；相反，它們將與現行國際秩序中的其他機構鬆散或緊密地聯係在一起。

在單極世界，國際秩序可以采取兩種形式之一——不可知論或意識形態——這取決於領先國家的政治意識形態。關鍵問題是單極國家是否具有普遍主義的意識形態，即認為其核心價值觀和政治製度應該輸出到其他國家。如果單極國家做出這種假設，世界秩序將是意識形態的。換句話說，唯一的一極國家將試圖廣泛傳播其意識形態，並按照自己的形象重塑世界。它將處於有利地位，可以完成這一使命，因為沒有競爭對手大國可以與之競爭。

當然，自由主義包含著強大的普遍主義思想，這源於它對個人權利重要性的強調。自由主義的核心是個人主義，它認為每個人都有一套不可剝奪的或自然的權利。因此，自由主義者往往深切關注世界各地人民的權利，無論他們生活在哪個國家。因此，如果單極世界是一個自由民主國家，它幾乎肯定會試圖建立一個旨在按照自己的形象重塑世界的國際秩序。10

自由國際秩序是什麽樣的？該體係中的主導國家顯然必須是一個自由民主國家，並且必須在構成該秩序的關鍵機構中擁有巨大影響力。此外，該體係中必須有相當數量的其他自由民主國家，以及一個基本上開放的世界經濟。這些自由民主國家，尤其是領先的國家，的最終目標是

其一，是在全球範圍內傳播民主，同時促進更廣泛的經濟交流，建立日益強大和有效的國際機構。本質上，其目標是建立一個完全由自由民主國家組成的世界秩序，這些國家在經濟上相互聯係，並由一套共同的規則約束在一起。其基本假設是，這樣的秩序將在很大程度上沒有戰爭，並將為其所有成員國帶來繁榮。

共產主義是另一種普世意識形態，可以作為建立意識形態國際秩序的基礎。事實上，馬克思主義與自由主義有一些重要的相似之處。正如約翰·格雷所說，“兩者都是期待普世文明的開明意識形態。”11換句話說，自由主義和共產主義都致力於改變世界。共產主義的普世維度基於階級概念，而不是權利概念。馬克思及其追隨者認為，社會階級超越民族群體和國家邊界。最重要的是，他們認為資本主義剝削有助於在不同國家的工人階級之間建立強大的聯係。因此，如果蘇聯贏得了冷戰，並在 1989 年感受到了美國對自由民主的那種對馬克思主義的熱情，蘇聯領導人肯定會試圖建立共產主義國際秩序。

如果單極國家沒有普世意識形態，因此不致力於將其政治價值觀和治理體係強加給其他國家，國際秩序將是不可知論的。12 主導大國仍將針對挑戰其權威的政權，並仍將深度參與管理構成國際秩序的機構和塑造符合其自身利益的世界經濟。然而，它不會致力於塑造全球範圍內的地方政治。相反，單極國家在與其他國家打交道時會更加寬容和務實。如果俄羅斯以其現有的政治製度成為單極國家，國際體係將是不可知論的，因為俄羅斯不受普世意識形態的驅動。中國也是如此，其政權的合法性主要來源是民族主義，而不是共產主義。13 這並不是否認共產主義的某些方麵對中國統治者仍然具有政治重要性，但北京的領導層幾乎沒有表現出共產主義通常具有的傳教熱情。14

厚秩序和薄秩序
到目前為止，我已經區分了國際秩序和有界秩序，並將國際秩序分為現實主義、不可知論和意識形態三種。對秩序（無論是國際秩序還是有界秩序）進行分類的第三種方法是關注它們對國家活動最重要領域的覆蓋廣度和深度。關於廣度，核心問題是秩序是否對其成員國的關鍵經濟和軍事活動產生影響。關於深度，主要問題是秩序中的機構是否對其成員國的行為產生重大影響。換句話說，秩序是否具有強大而有效的機構？

考慮到這兩個維度，我們可以區分厚秩序和薄秩序。厚秩序或強秩序由對經濟和軍事領域國家行為產生重大影響的製度組成。這種秩序既廣泛又深入。另一方麵，薄秩序可以采取三種基本形式。首先，它可能隻涉及經濟或軍事領域，但不會同時涉及這兩個領域。即使該領域包含強大的製度，它仍將被歸類為薄秩序。其次，秩序可能涉及一個甚至兩個領域，但包含弱製度。第三，一種秩序可能涉及經濟和軍事事務，但隻在其中一個領域擁有強大的製度，這是可能的，但可能性不大。簡而言之，薄秩序要麽不廣泛，要麽一點也不深入，要麽隻在兩個關鍵領域中的一個領域深入。圖 1 總結了本文采用的不同類別的秩序。

圖 1.
秩序類型學
查看大圖下載幻燈片
秩序類型學

國際秩序的興起和衰落
沒有一種國際秩序能夠永遠存在，這就提出了一個問題：現有秩序的消亡和新秩序的興起的原因是什麽？決定現行秩序的兩個因素，即權力分配和主要國家的政治意識形態，也解釋了現實主義和不可知論秩序的衰落以及取而代之的秩序類型。雖然這些因素也有助於解釋意識形態秩序的瓦解，但另外兩個因素，即民族主義和權力平衡政治，通常在導致意識形態秩序崩潰方麵發揮著核心作用。

現實主義秩序以兩極或多極為基礎，當底層權力分配發生變化時，它們就會崩潰。

權力會發生根本性的變化。如果國際體係從兩極轉向多極或反之，或者多極體係中的大國數量減少或增加，那麽所產生的秩序仍然是現實主義的，盡管其結構有所不同。無論體係中的大國數量有多少，它們仍然必須相互競爭權力和影響力。但是，如果兩極或多極讓位於單極，那麽新秩序要麽是不可知論的，要麽是意識形態的，這取決於唯一一極是否致力於一種普遍主義的意識形態。

現實主義秩序往往具有很強的持久力，因為權力平衡的重大轉變通常是大國之間長期經濟增長差異的結果。然而，大國戰爭有時會導致全球權力分配的迅速變化，盡管這種情況很少見。15例如，二戰後，體係從多極轉向兩極，主要是因為德國和日本的徹底失敗以及戰爭給英國和法國帶來的慘痛代價。蘇聯和美國成為兩極。此外，當現實主義秩序發生變化時，它們通常會讓位於新構建的現實主義秩序——就像二戰後發生的那樣——僅僅是因為單極世界很少見。

不可知論秩序也往往具有相當大的持久力，因為單極世界接受政治和社會生活中固有的異質性，不會試圖微觀管理地球上幾乎每個國家的政治。這種務實的行為有助於維護甚至增強霸權國家的權力。當單極讓位於兩極或多極，使該秩序成為現實主義時，不可知論秩序很可能會走向終結；或者如果唯一一極在國內經曆一場革命並采用一種普遍主義的意識形態，這肯定會導致它形成一種意識形態秩序。

相比之下，任何以普世意識形態為基礎的國際意識形態秩序，如自由主義或共產主義，都注定壽命短暫，這主要是因為當單極國家試圖按照自己的形象重塑世界時，國內和全球都會出現困難。民族主義和權力平衡政治會破壞政權更迭目標國家所需的社會工程，而民族主義也會在國內給單極國家及其意識形態盟友帶來重大問題。當這些問題出現時，單極國家很可能會放棄按照自己的形象重塑世界，實際上放棄了向國外輸出意識形態的努力。它甚至可能完全放棄這種意識形態。當這種情況發生時，秩序就不再是意識形態的，而是不可知論的。

意識形態秩序也可能以第二種方式終結。新的大國可能會出現，這將破壞單極體係，導致兩極或多極體係的出現。在這種情況下，意識形態秩序將被有界限的國際現實主義秩序所取代。

冷戰秩序，1945-89 年
1945 年至 1989 年，全球權力分配呈現兩極化，導致形成了三個主要政治秩序。當時存在一個總體國際秩序，該秩序主要由蘇聯和美國創建和維持，目的是在雙方有共同利益時促進雙方合作。盡管強調合作，但它並不是一個自由秩序，因為超級大國在整個冷戰期間都處於激烈的競爭中，他們創建的秩序完全符合雙方的安全利益。此外，蘇聯不是一個自由民主國家，莫斯科和華盛頓實際上是意識形態上的對手。還有兩個有界限的秩序，一個主要局限於西方，由美國主導，另一個主要由世界共產主義國家組成，由蘇聯主導。它們是由超級大國為彼此進行安全競爭而創建的。

冷戰期間的國際秩序很薄弱，因為它對各國（尤其是大國）在經濟或軍事領域的行為沒有顯著影響。由於西方和共產主義世界在冷戰期間隻進行了極少的經濟交流，因此幾乎不需要建立機構來幫助管理他們的經濟交易。16 然而，在軍事上，情況要複雜得多。鑒於美國和蘇聯是爭奪權力的死對頭，他們集中精力建立強有力的邊界秩序來幫助進行這場鬥爭。因此，每個超級大國建立的主要軍事機構——北約和華沙條約組織——都不是國際性的。相反，它們是美國和蘇聯主導的邊界秩序的關鍵要素。

然而，美國和蘇聯

有時候，兩國有充分的理由進行合作，並就符合雙方共同利益的軍備控製協議進行談判。最重要的是，兩國共同製定了旨在防止核擴散的機構。兩國還達成了旨在限製軍備競賽的協議，以節省資金、禁止破壞穩定的武器，並避免在南極洲等地區進行競爭。最後，兩國達成了旨在建立“道路規則”和建立信任措施的協議。在此過程中，莫斯科和華盛頓幫助加強了冷戰時期的國際秩序，盡管這一秩序仍然很薄弱。

兩個超級大國在獲得原子彈後立即反對進一步擴散。盡管美國在 1945 年試驗了第一枚原子彈，蘇聯在 1949 年也緊隨其後，但直到 20 世紀 70 年代中期，兩國才建立了一套能夠真正限製核武器擴散的機構。第一步是 1957 年國際原子能機構的成立。其主要使命是促進核能的民用，但要采取保障措施，確保接受用於和平目的的核材料和技術的國家不會將其用於製造核彈。超級大國為遏製核擴散而設立的關鍵機構是《不擴散核武器條約》和核供應國集團，這兩個機構與國際原子能機構一起，在 1975 年後顯著減緩了核武器的擴散。

美國和蘇聯也在 20 世紀 60 年代末開始尋求達成軍備控製協議，以限製其戰略核武庫。其結果是 1972 年《戰略武器限製條約》（SALT I），該條約限製了雙方可以部署的戰略核武器數量（盡管數量非常高），並嚴格限製了反彈道導彈係統的發展。 1979 年，莫斯科和華盛頓簽署了《第二階段戰略武器限製條約》，進一步限製了雙方的戰略核武庫，但雙方均未批準該條約。20 世紀 80 年代，兩個超級大國共同製定了後續協議《削減戰略武器條約》，但直到冷戰結束後才生效。另一項重要的軍備控製協議是 1988 年的《中程核力量條約》，該條約消除了蘇聯和美國軍火庫中的所有短程和中程導彈。

兩個超級大國還談判達成了許多其他不太重要的安全協議和條約，這些協議和條約也是冷戰國際秩序的一部分。這些協議包括《南極條約體係》（1959 年）、《部分禁止核試驗條約》（1963 年）、《莫斯科-華盛頓熱線》（1963 年）、《外層空間條約》（1967 年）、《海底軍備控製條約》（1971 年）、《美蘇海上事故協定》（1972 年）、《歐洲安全與合作會議》（1973 年）、《生物武器公約》（1975 年）和《赫爾辛基協定》（1975 年）。還有一些協議是在冷戰期間達成的，例如《聯合國海洋法公約》，該公約於 1982 年簽署，但直到冷戰結束五年後的 1994 年才得到批準和生效。

聯合國可能是冷戰時期國際秩序中最引人注目的機構，但它對世界各國的行為影響甚微，主要是因為超級大國之間的競爭使得該機構幾乎不可能采取和執行相應的政策。

除了這種薄弱的國際秩序之外，超級大國還各自建立了一個有界限的厚秩序來幫助發動冷戰。蘇聯主導的秩序包括處理經濟、軍事和意識形態問題的機構。17 例如，經濟互助委員會 (Comecon) 成立於 1949 年，旨在促進蘇聯與東歐共產主義國家之間的貿易。華沙條約組織是一個軍事聯盟，成立於 1955 年，旨在對抗北約，因為北約成員國決定邀請西德加入北約。該公約還幫助莫斯科控製其東歐盟友。最後，蘇聯於 1947 年成立了共產主義情報局，作為共產國際的繼任者。兩者旨在協調世界各地共產黨的努力，主要目的是讓蘇聯向其意識形態同胞傳播其政策觀點。共產黨信息局於 1956 年解散。

西方有界秩序由美國主導，美國將其塑造為符合其自身利益的秩序。它包括許多經濟機構，如國際貨幣基金組織 (1945 年)、世界銀行 (1945 年)、貿易和關稅總協定 (GATT，1947 年)、多邊出口管製協調委員會 (CoCom，1950 年) 和歐洲共同體 (EC，1950 年)，以及安全方麵的北約。盡管自由的美國主導著這一有界秩序，但其中還包括許多其他自由民主國家，

事實上，這是一個自上而下的現實主義秩序。其主要使命是建立一個強大的西方，以遏製並最終擊敗蘇聯及其盟友。

盡管強調安全，但創造繁榮本身就是這一有限秩序中各國的重要目標。此外，這一現實主義秩序的某些方麵與自由主義原則相兼容。例如，毫無疑問，在其他條件相同的情況下，美國決策者更喜歡與民主國家打交道，而不是與威權國家打交道。但當民主與權力平衡政治的要求相衝突時，推廣民主總是會屈服。美國並沒有阻止非民主國家加入北約，也沒有驅逐那些加入後放棄民主的國家，正如希臘、葡萄牙和土耳其的例子所表明的那樣。

此外，盡管華盛頓傾向於支持鼓勵該秩序成員國之間自由貿易和投資的經濟政策，但這些政策首先受到戰略考慮的指導。正如喬安妮·戈瓦 (Joanne Gowa) 所言，“東西方衝突促使美國將安全政治與貿易政治相結合，這一主題在那些定義和發展國際政治經濟學分支的學者的著作中反複出現。”18 事實上，德懷特·艾森豪威爾政府普遍認為自由貿易是創造經濟和軍事實力的最佳方式，但在 20 世紀 50 年代中期，它準備讓歐共體成為一個封閉的經濟集團——也就是破壞自由貿易——因為它認為這種不自由的安排將使西歐成為冷戰中更強大的夥伴。19 此外，馬歇爾計劃主要是出於戰略考慮。正如塞巴斯蒂安·羅薩托 (Sebastian Rosato) 所指出的那樣，權力政治支撐了歐盟前身歐共體的建立。20

自由國際秩序，1990-2019
冷戰結束、蘇聯解體後，美國是世界上最強大的國家。 “單極時刻”已經到來，這意味著大國之間安全競爭產生的大多數製約因素都已不複存在。21 此外，美國為應對蘇聯而建立的厚重西方秩序依然穩固，而蘇聯秩序則迅速瓦解。1991 年夏天，經互會和華沙條約組織解散，蘇聯於 1991 年 12 月解體。不出所料，老布什總統決定將現實主義的西方秩序推廣到全球，將其轉變為自由主義國際秩序。構成冷戰時期薄弱國際秩序的機構——聯合國和各種軍備控製協議——將被納入布什所謂的“新世界秩序”。22

這一雄心勃勃的努力得到了東亞尤其是西歐自由民主國家的熱烈支持，盡管美國占據主導地位這一點從未受到任何懷疑。正如布什在 1990 年所說的那樣，“美國的領導地位無可替代。”23 或者正如國務卿馬德琳·奧爾布賴特和總統巴拉克·奧巴馬喜歡說的那樣，美國是“不可或缺的國家”。24 從本質上講，布什及其白宮繼任者一心要創建一個與冷戰時期的西方秩序根本不同的新國際秩序。具體來說，他們致力於將有限的現實主義秩序轉變為國際自由主義秩序。25 事實上，比爾·克林頓在 1992 年競選總統時明確表示，其前任的新世界秩序概念不夠雄心勃勃。26

創建自由國際秩序涉及三項主要任務。首先，必須擴大組成西方秩序的機構的成員數量，並在必要時建立新機構。換句話說，重要的是建立一個具有普遍成員資格的國際機構網絡，對成員國的行為產生巨大影響。其次，必須建立一個開放、包容的國際經濟，最大限度地實現自由貿易，促進不受約束的資本市場。這種超全球化的世界經濟的範圍比冷戰期間西方盛行的經濟秩序要雄心勃勃得多。第三，必須大力在世界各地傳播自由民主，當美國與蘇聯爭奪權力時，這一使命常常被忽視。這一目標並不是美國獨有的；它的歐洲盟友也普遍接受了這一承諾。27

當然，這三項任務與主要的自由主義和平理論直接相關：自由製度主義、經濟相互依存理論和民主和平理論。因此，在其設計者看來，構建一個強大、可持續的自由主義和平理論

自由國際秩序等同於創造一個和平的世界。這種根深蒂固的信念給了美國及其盟友強大的動力，促使他們努力工作以創造新秩序。將中國和俄羅斯納入其中對於其成功尤其重要，因為它們是繼美國之後體係中最強大的國家。目標是將它們嵌入盡可能多的機構，將它們完全融入開放的國際經濟，並幫助它們轉變為自由民主國家。

北約向東歐擴張是美國及其盟友努力將受限製的西方秩序轉變為自由國際秩序的一個很好的例子。28 人們可能會認為，北約東移是經典威懾戰略的一部分，旨在遏製可能具有侵略性的俄羅斯。29 但事實並非如此，因為西方的戰略是朝著自由主義目標發展的。目標是將東歐國家——也許有一天俄羅斯也會加入——納入冷戰期間在西歐發展起來的“安全共同體”。沒有證據表明，其主要設計者——克林頓、布什和奧巴馬總統——認為俄羅斯可能會入侵其鄰國，因此需要遏製，或者他們認為俄羅斯領導人有正當理由擔心北約擴張。30

克林頓政府向美國和西歐公眾兜售這一政策的方式反映了這種對北約擴張的自由主義態度。例如，副國務卿斯特羅布·塔爾博特在 1995 年提出，讓東歐國家加入北約——以及歐盟——是實現這一潛在動蕩地區穩定的關鍵。塔爾博特認為，“北約擴張將成為歐洲新民主國家內部和它們之間的法治力量。”此外，它將“促進和鞏固民主和自由市場價值觀”，這將進一步促進和平。31

美國在後冷戰時期對華政策也基於同樣的自由主義邏輯。例如，國務卿奧爾布賴特堅持認為，與崛起的中國維持和平關係的關鍵是與其接觸，而不是像冷戰期間美國試圖對付蘇聯那樣試圖遏製它。奧爾布賴特聲稱，接觸將使中國積極加入一些世界主要機構，並幫助中國融入美國主導的經濟秩序，這必然有助於中國成為一個自由民主國家。中國將成為國際體係中“負責任的利益相關者”，積極維護與其他國家之間的和平關係。32

布什主義是在 2002 年發展起來的，並被用來為 2003 年 3 月入侵伊拉克辯護，這是美國旨在建立自由國際秩序的重大政策的第三個例子。 2001 年 9 月 11 日恐怖襲擊事件發生後，布什政府得出結論，要贏得所謂的全球反恐戰爭，不僅需要擊敗基地組織，還需要對抗伊朗、伊拉克和敘利亞等國家。政府的主要操作假設是，這些所謂的流氓國家的政權與基地組織等恐怖組織關係密切，一心想獲得核武器，甚至可能將核武器交給恐怖分子。33 政府認為，應對核擴散和恐怖主義的最佳方法是將大中東地區的所有國家變成自由民主國家，這將使該地區成為一個巨大的和平區，從而消除核擴散和恐怖主義這兩個雙重問題。34 “世界對傳播民主價值觀有著明確的利益，”布什總統宣稱，“因為穩定和自由的國家不會滋生謀殺的意識形態。它們鼓勵人們以和平的方式追求更美好的生活。”35

20 世紀 90 年代初，許多觀察家認為，美國完全有能力構建自由主義國際秩序。它在冷戰期間擁有豐富的建立和運行西方秩序的經驗，與潛在競爭對手相比，它非常強大。中國正處於崛起的早期階段，俄羅斯處於完全混亂的狀態，這種情況在整個 20 世紀 90 年代一直如此。這種巨大的權力優勢意味著單極國家可以在很大程度上無視現實主義的指令，按照自由主義原則行事，這在冷戰期間是不可能的。這也意味著美國可以哄騙或強迫其他國家遵守其法令。當然，華盛頓也有可能使用武力來達到目的。

最後，美國及其盟友在冷戰結束後的幾年裏擁有充分的合法性。他們不僅贏得了那場曠日持久的衝突，而且似乎沒有可行的替代方案來取代自由民主，而自由民主似乎是美國的最佳政治秩序

可預見的未來。當時西方普遍認為，世界上幾乎每個國家最終都會成為自由民主國家——這一信念讓弗朗西斯·福山得出結論，這可能是“曆史的終結”。36 此外，在冷戰期間幫助西方實現繁榮的眾多國際機構似乎非常適合將全球化推向下一步。從本質上講，美國似乎完全有能力推行自由霸權，這是一種呼籲建立基於自由原則的世界秩序的外交政策。37

在 20 世紀 90 年代和 21 世紀初，美國及其親密盟友似乎正在建立全麵的自由國際秩序。當然也存在問題，但總體而言，新興秩序運行良好。很少有人預料到，它會在新千年的幾年後開始瓦解，但事實就是如此。

黃金時代，1990-2004
冷戰結束後，美國及其盟友努力將中國和俄羅斯納入該秩序的主要經濟機構，總體上取得了成功。俄羅斯於 1992 年加入了國際貨幣基金組織和世界銀行，但直到 2012 年才加入世界貿易組織 (WTO)。中國自 1980 年起取代台灣成為國際貨幣基金組織和世界銀行的成員。中國於 2001 年加入世貿組織。盡管 1997 年因台灣問題爆發了小規模危機，但北京和華盛頓在整個 1990 年代和 2000 年代初期一直保持著良好的關係。接觸似乎正在發揮作用。莫斯科和華盛頓的關係在此期間也發展良好。

歐洲的情況也不錯。 1992 年《馬斯特裏赫特條約》是推動歐洲一體化的重要一步，1999 年歐元首次亮相，這被廣泛視為歐盟前景光明的證據。此外，盡管俄羅斯決策者明確表示反對，但歐盟和北約向東歐擴張的早期浪潮幾乎沒有出現問題。最後，捷克斯洛伐克和蘇聯都和平解體。然而，南斯拉夫並沒有解體，而是引發了波斯尼亞和科索沃戰爭，美國及其北約盟友對此反應遲緩，未能結束戰爭。但最終在 1999 年，巴爾幹半島實現了冷和平。

大中東地區的發展情況更加複雜，但即使在那裏，該地區似乎也在緩慢但穩步地融入自由國際秩序。以色列和巴勒斯坦解放組織於 1993 年 9 月簽署了《奧斯陸協定》，讓人們希望雙方能在 2020 年前找到和平解決衝突的辦法。 1991 年初，在聯合國安理會授權下，美國率領廣泛的盟國聯盟在伊拉克取得了驚人的軍事勝利——解放了科威特，大大削弱了伊拉克的軍事實力，並揭露了薩達姆·侯賽因的秘密核武器計劃，該計劃隨後被關閉。盡管如此，複興社會黨政權仍然掌權。阿富汗仍然是一個麻煩地帶，主要是因為塔利班允許基地組織在那裏策劃行動，包括 9 月 11 日的恐怖襲擊，而不受幹涉。然而，那一天的事件促使美國於 2001 年 10 月入侵阿富汗，推翻了塔利班政權，建立了一個親西方的政權。然後，在 2003 年 3 月，美國軍隊征服了伊拉克，推翻了薩達姆的政權。到 2003 年夏天，旨在在整個大中東地區傳播民主的布什主義似乎將按預期發揮作用。

冷戰結束後，民主顯然在前進，這似乎證實了福山的主張，即民主沒有可行的替代方案。根據自由之家的數據，1986 年，世界上 34% 的國家是民主國家。到 1996 年，這一數字躍升至 41%，到 2006 年則升至 47%。38 在經濟方麵，超全球化為全球創造了大量財富，盡管 1997-98 年亞洲發生了重大金融危機。此外，人們對起訴侵犯人權者的興趣日益濃厚，這促使一位著名學者寫了一本名為《正義瀑布：人權起訴如何改變世界政治》的書。39 在核擴散方麵，南非於 1989 年放棄了核武器計劃，而 1990 年代中期，白俄羅斯、哈薩克斯坦和烏克蘭放棄了從蘇聯繼承的核武庫並加入了《不擴散核武器條約》。朝鮮在 20 世紀 90 年代初開始研製核武器，1994 年同意終止其核武器計劃。

美國及其盟友在 20 世紀 90 年代確實麵臨一些挫折。印度和巴基斯坦在 1998 年進行了核武器試驗；克林頓政府在索馬裏（1993 年）和海地（1994-95 年）的政策失敗；對盧旺達核問題反應太慢

1994 年的種族滅絕。美國也未能結束剛果和蘇丹的致命戰爭，而基地組織在阿富汗境內變得更加危險。盡管如此，人們仍然可以有力地證明，在短時間內，自由國際秩序在全球的傳播取得了巨大進展，美國及其盟友最終將能夠將非洲和其他陷入困境的國家納入新秩序，並在遏製核擴散方麵取得進一步進展。

自由秩序走下坡路，2005-19 年
21 世紀第一個十年中期，自由國際秩序開始出現嚴重裂痕，此後裂痕不斷擴大。想想大中東地區發生的事情。到 2005 年，伊拉克戰爭顯然正在成為一場災難，而美國沒有停止戰鬥的策略，更不用說把伊拉克變成一個自由民主國家了。與此同時，阿富汗局勢開始惡化，塔利班死而複生，將矛頭指向美國扶植的喀布爾政府。隨著時間的推移，塔利班勢力日益強大，阿富汗戰爭已成為美國曆史上持續時間最長的戰爭，持續時間比美國內戰、第一次世界大戰、第二次世界大戰和朝鮮戰爭的總和還要長。此外，美國似乎沒有獲勝的希望。此外，華盛頓及其盟友在利比亞和敘利亞推行政權更迭，最終導致兩國爆發致命內戰。此外，在幫助摧毀伊拉克和敘利亞的過程中，布什和奧巴馬政府在創建伊拉克和敘利亞伊斯蘭國方麵發揮了關鍵作用，美國於 2014 年與其開戰。

曾經看似充滿希望的奧斯陸和平進程已經失敗，巴勒斯坦人幾乎沒有希望建立自己的國家。在華盛頓的幫助下，以色列領導人反而在建立一個大以色列，正如兩位前以色列總理所說，這將是一個種族隔離國家。40 美國還加劇了也門內戰的傷亡和破壞，並在 2013 年埃及軍方推翻埃及民選政府時表示同意。美國及其盟友非但沒有將大中東納入自由國際秩序，反而在該地區傳播非自由混亂方麵無意中扮演了核心角色。

歐洲在 20 世紀 90 年代似乎是自由星係中最耀眼的明星，但到 2010 年代末卻陷入了嚴重困境。2005 年，法國和荷蘭選民否決了擬議的《建立歐洲憲法條約》，歐盟遭受重大挫折。更具破壞性的是始於 2009 年底並持續至今的歐元區危機。這場危機不僅暴露了歐元的脆弱性，還引發了德國和希臘之間的強烈敵意，以及其他政治問題。41 更糟糕的是，英國於 2016 年 6 月投票退出歐盟，排外右翼政黨在整個歐洲勢力越來越大。事實上，東歐領導人普遍持有不自由的觀點。正如《紐約時報》 2018 年 1 月的一篇文章所說：“捷克總統稱穆斯林移民是罪犯。波蘭執政黨領導人表示，難民中疾病肆虐。匈牙利領導人將移民描述為毒藥……[和] 奧地利新任極右翼內政部長建議將移民集中在庇護中心——這顯然與二戰如出一轍。”42

最後，2014 年烏克蘭東部爆發內戰，俄羅斯卷入其中，2014 年 3 月俄羅斯從烏克蘭手中奪取了克裏米亞，導致俄羅斯與西方的關係嚴重惡化。雙方都在東歐擴充軍事力量，並定期舉行軍事演習，加劇了雙方之間的猜疑和緊張局勢。這場危機主要是由於歐盟和北約擴張，再加上西方國家在格魯吉亞和烏克蘭等國家，甚至可能是俄羅斯本身推行民主而造成的，而且沒有跡象表明這場危機很快就會結束。43 鑒於這種情況，莫斯科正在尋找機會挑撥西方關係，削弱歐盟和北約。

跨大西洋關係也出現了裂痕，尤其是特朗普入主白宮後。特朗普對構成自由國際秩序的幾乎所有機構都嗤之以鼻，其中包括歐盟和北約。他在 2016 年競選期間曾稱這些機構“已經過時”。44 特朗普上任後不久，在發給歐洲領導人的一封信中，一位歐盟主要政策製定者表示，新總統對歐盟的未來構成了嚴重威脅。45 幾個月後，就在特朗普入主白宮後不久，堅定的大西洋主義者德國總理安格拉·默克爾警告稱，歐洲不能依賴特朗普。

她說，歐洲人“真的必須把命運掌握在自己手中”。46 此後，跨大西洋關係隻會惡化，在可預見的未來出現轉機的可能性似乎很小。

2007-08 年的全球金融危機不僅給許多人的生活造成了巨大損害，而且還使人們對管理自由國際秩序的精英的能力產生了質疑。47 除了俄羅斯與西方關係惡化外，還有令人擔憂的跡象表明，美國可能與中國發生衝突，中國決心改變東海、南海、台灣和中印邊界的現狀。不出所料，美國現在更感興趣的是遏製中國，而不是與中國接觸。事實上，特朗普政府最近表示，讓中國加入世貿組織是一個錯誤，因為北京的保護主義政策清楚地表明，它不願意遵守該機構的規則。48

最後，自 2006 年以來，自由民主國家的數量一直在下降，扭轉了曾經看似不可阻擋的趨勢。49 與此相關的是，軟威權主義似乎已成為自由民主的一個有吸引力的替代方案，這種發展在 20 世紀 90 年代初幾乎是不可想象的。一些領導人頌揚非自由民主的優點，而另一些人則治理著致力於基於根深蒂固的宗教信仰的政治製度的國家。當然，自由民主近年來失去了一些吸引力，特別是因為美國的政治體係往往看起來功能失調。即使是嚴肅的學者也擔心美國民主的未來。50

總之，自由國際秩序正在崩潰。

哪裏出了問題？
盡管美國及其盟友在建立自由國際秩序方麵取得了早期成功，但這一秩序也蘊含著自身毀滅的種子。即使西方決策者能夠更明智地管理這一秩序，他們也無法以任何有意義的方式延長其壽命。它注定會失敗，因為它包含三個致命缺陷。

首先，幹預各國政治以將其轉變為自由民主國家極其困難，在全球範圍內嚐試如此雄心勃勃的社會工程幾乎肯定會適得其反，並破壞這一事業本身的合法性。民族主義幾乎肯定會在政權更迭目標國家內部引起強烈抵製。權力平衡政治也將有助於在特定情況下阻礙這一事業。擔心政權更迭（或美國其他形式的幹涉）的國家將聯合起來相互支持，並尋求挫敗美國自由主義議程的方法。因此，敘利亞和伊朗在 2003 年美國入侵伊拉克後協助了伊拉克叛亂，俄羅斯和中國在經濟、軍事以及聯合國安理會等國際論壇上相互支持。

其次，自由國際秩序最終創造了導致自由民主國家內部出現嚴重政治問題的條件，這些問題涉及主權和民族認同，當政權更迭的努力失敗並導致大規模難民湧入自由國家時，情況就更是如此。同樣，問題的主要原因是民族主義，即使在自稱自由的社會中，民族主義也遠未消亡。

第三，超全球化給自由民主國家（包括唯一極點）的大量民眾帶來了巨大的經濟成本。這些成本包括失業、工資下降或停滯以及明顯的收入不平等，對國內政治產生了嚴重影響，進一步破壞了自由國際秩序。此外，開放的國際經濟助長了中國的崛起，而中國和俄羅斯的複興最終削弱了單極世界，而單極世界是建立自由國際秩序的必要條件。

推廣民主的危險

建立自由國際秩序最重要的要求是廣泛傳播自由民主，這最初被視為一項完全可行的任務。西方普遍認為，政治已經發展到沒有其他合理替代自由民主的地步。如果是這樣，那麽建立自由國際秩序就相對容易了，因為在世界各地傳播自由民主幾乎不會遇到阻力。事實上，大多數人都歡迎生活在西方式民主中的想法，就像共產主義垮台後東歐的情況一樣。

然而，這項努力從一開始就注定要失敗。首先，對於什麽是理想的政治製度，從來沒有、也永遠不會有普遍的共識。有人可能會說自由民主是最好的政府形式（我會這樣認為），但其他人總是會傾向於不同的治理體係。值得記住的是，在 20 世紀 30 年代，許多人

歐洲人更喜歡共產主義或法西斯主義，而不是自由民主。人們可能會指出，自由民主最終戰勝了這兩種“主義”。盡管這是事實，但 20 世紀 30 年代的曆史提醒我們，自由民主並不是命中注定的秩序，精英及其公眾選擇替代政治製度並不罕見。因此，東歐出現非自由民主國家，而中國和俄羅斯則實行獨裁統治，朝鮮是獨裁政權，伊朗是伊斯蘭共和國，以色列越來越重視其猶太身份而非民主特征，這並不奇怪。51 世界上從未有過超過 50% 的國家是自由民主國家，這也不足為奇。52

關於什麽是最好的治理製度的這種觀點的多樣性與民族主義相結合，使得在世界各地傳播自由民主的過程變得極其困難。畢竟，民族主義是一種非常強大的政治力量，它非常重視自決和主權。換言之，民族國家不希望其他民族國家告訴它們應該如何安排自己的政治製度。因此，試圖將自由民主強加給一個傾向於另一種政府形式的國家幾乎肯定會引起激烈的抵抗。

對抗必敗之戰

試圖建立自由國際秩序必然會導致與旨在將這些目標轉變為自由民主國家的次要國家的戰爭。在兩極或多極體係中，大國可以嚐試的此類社會工程的程度受到很大限製，主要是因為它們必須專注於相互競爭權力和影響力。傳播自由民主是次要的，甚至第三重要的；事實上，有時自由國家會尋求支持威權政府，如果它們與競爭對手大國結盟，就像美國在冷戰期間多次做的那樣。

然而，在單極世界中，唯一的一極可以自由地開展十字軍東征，使世界更加民主，僅僅是因為沒有競爭對手大國需要擔心。因此，毫不奇怪的是，自冷戰結束以來，美國打了七場戰爭，並且在此期間每三年就有兩年處於戰爭狀態。53 然而，這樣的戰爭往往無法實現其目標。

美國使用軍事力量實現民主的努力主要集中在大中東地區，但卻一次又一次地失敗。54 美國軍隊入侵阿富汗（2001 年）和伊拉克（2003 年），意圖將其變成自由民主國家。占領軍不僅沒有實現這一目標，而且還引發了血腥戰爭，給這兩個國家的政治和社會生活造成了巨大的破壞。造成這種慘淡記錄的主要原因是，在任何社會進行大規模的社會工程都是困難的，但在政治領導層剛剛被推翻的外國，這尤其令人生畏。目標國將陷入混亂；入侵部隊將與一種甚至可能對自由民主懷有敵意的外來文化打交道；最重要的是，民族主義情緒必將急劇上升，並引發反抗占領者的叛亂，正如美國在阿富汗和伊拉克所發現的那樣。

盡管這些失敗削弱了公眾對自由國際秩序的支持，並對其領導人的能力產生了懷疑，但它們並沒有阻止這個唯一的極地試圖通過軍事手段傳播自由民主，這進一步擴大了自身的範圍。55 相反，它尋找成本更低的方法來完成這項任務，這實際上意味著放棄征服和占領非民主國家，采用不同的策略來推翻獨裁領導人。因此，當 2011 年利比亞敵對派係爆發戰鬥時，美國及其歐洲盟友動用空中力量幫助穆阿邁爾·卡紮菲上校下台。但西方大國無論有沒有地麵部隊，都無法將利比亞變成一個正常運轉的國家，更不用說一個自由民主國家了。

同樣在 2011 年，美國及其中東盟友試圖通過武裝和訓練反對他的叛亂組織來推翻敘利亞總統巴沙爾·阿薩德。然而，這一努力失敗了，主要是因為與敘利亞有著長期戰略關係的俄羅斯於 2015 年進行幹預，以維持阿薩德的權力。現實政治挫敗了美國在敘利亞的努力。但即使阿薩德被罷免，最終結果要麽是衝突的延續，就像在利比亞一樣，要麽是另一個殘酷獨裁者的上台，就像埃及總統胡斯尼·穆巴拉克於 2011 年初被罷免後最終發生的那樣。敘利亞的自由民主不太可能實現，但豐富的

謀殺和混亂。

將主要大國變成敵人
最後，建立自由國際秩序的努力所依賴的十字軍心態導致單極國家與體係中任何非自由民主的大國之間的關係惡化。盡管占主導地位的國家會強烈傾向於對小國發動戰爭以促進自由民主，但它很少會為此目的攻擊大國，尤其是當它們擁有核武器時。56 成本太高，成功的可能性尤其低。因此，後冷戰時期的美國政策製定者從未認真考慮入侵中國或俄羅斯，盡管美國比這兩個國家都強大得多。

盡管如此，美國一直致力於將中國和俄羅斯變成自由民主國家，並將它們納入美國主導的自由世界秩序。美國領導人不僅明確表明了他們的意圖，而且還依靠非政府組織和各種微妙的策略推動北京和莫斯科接受自由民主。實際上，他們的目標是和平的政權更迭。可以預見的是，中國和俄羅斯抵製單極國家的努力，其原因與小國反對美國影響其國內政治的努力相同，事實上，也是美國人現在對俄羅斯幹涉其國家政治的想法感到畏懼的原因。在一個民族主義是最強大的政治意識形態的世界裏，自決和主權對所有國家都至關重要。

中國和俄羅斯也出於現實主義的原因抵製自由秩序的傳播，因為這將使美國在經濟、軍事和政治上主宰國際體係。例如，北京和莫斯科都不希望美國軍隊駐紮在其周邊地區，更不用說在其邊境了。因此，中國談論將美國軍隊趕出西太平洋，而俄羅斯長期以來強烈反對歐盟和北約向東歐擴張，這並不令人驚訝。事實上，將這些機構移向俄羅斯最終導致了 2014 年的烏克蘭危機。這場持續的衝突不僅毒害了俄羅斯與西方的關係，而且激勵莫斯科尋找削弱歐盟和北約的方法。簡而言之，民族主義和現實主義的考量導致單極世界的兩個大國對單極世界建立強大的自由國際秩序的努力提出異議。

讓自由民主國家反對自由秩序
建立強大的自由國際秩序最終會導致自由民主國家內部出現嚴重的政治問題，因為伴隨的政策與民族主義相衝突。國內的這些問題以兩種形式出現，最終會破壞秩序本身。

首先，自由國家堅信國際機構的優點，這導致它們將越來越多的權力委托給構成秩序的機構。然而，這一策略被廣泛視為這些國家放棄主權的證據。人們可以爭論這些自由國家是否真的放棄了主權，但毫無疑問，它們正在將一些重要決策的權力委托給這些機構，這很可能給現代民族國家帶來嚴重的政治麻煩。57 畢竟，民族主義強調自決和主權，因此它與製定對其成員國產生決定性影響的政策的國際機構存在根本衝突。58 Jeff Colgan 和 Robert Keohane 寫道：“這種國際權力擴張的累積效應是過度限製主權，讓人們覺得外國勢力在控製他們的生活。”59

這個問題的嚴重程度將取決於相關機構對其成員國擁有多大的權力和影響力。當然，構成自由世界秩序的機構旨在對其成員國的行為產生深遠影響。這種製度影響不可避免地引發了對“民主赤字”的擔憂。這些國家的選民開始認為，那些為他們做出重大決定的遙遠的官僚是不可接近和不負責任的。

有明顯證據表明，這種現象在整個歐洲都存在。60 以 2016 年支持英國脫歐的投票為例。鑒於歐盟對其成員國政策的巨大影響，大多數英國公民投票支持英國脫歐的主要原因之一是他們認為他們的國家向布魯塞爾移交了太多權力，是時候重申英國主權了，這並不奇怪。特別是，許多英國人認為英國已經失去了對其經濟政策的控製，這正在破壞民主的公平。

不穩定。61 布魯塞爾的歐盟官僚並非由英國人選舉產生，他們被視為英國經濟政策和其他政策的主要製定者。因此，一項關於英國脫歐的重要研究的作者寫道：“重新獲得主權——奪回控製權——是 2016 年公投的主要主題。”62

西方對放棄主權的擔憂並不僅限於歐盟。正如羅伯特·庫特納 (Robert Kuttner) 指出的那樣，隨著 20 世紀 90 年代超全球化的蓬勃發展，國際貨幣基金組織和世界銀行“變成了布雷頓森林體係所想象的角色的對立麵。它們成為執行古典自由放任主義作為普遍治理原則的工具。”63 不出所料，對主權的擔憂在最近的美國政治中發揮了重要作用。尤其是特朗普在競選總統時，強調“美國優先”，他嚴厲批評了構成自由國際秩序的所有關鍵機構，包括歐盟、國際貨幣基金組織和世界銀行。64

自由國際秩序還采取了與國家認同相衝突的政策，這對世界各地的人們，包括美國和西歐的人們來說都非常重要。65 自由主義的核心是一種個人主義意識形態，它非常重視不可剝奪的權利的概念。這種信念認為地球上的每個人都擁有相同的基本權利，這是自由主義普遍主義維度的基礎。這種普遍主義或跨國觀點與民族主義的深刻特殊主義形成鮮明對比，民族主義建立在世界被劃分為獨立國家、每個國家都有自己文化的信念之上。保護文化的最好方式是擁有自己的國家，這樣民族才能在“他者”的威脅麵前生存下來。66

鑒於自由主義強調個人享有平等權利，加上其淡化甚至忽視民族認同的傾向，自由國際秩序強調各國應該理所當然地接受尋求庇護的難民，個人在因經濟或其他原因從一個民族國家轉移到另一個民族國家時應該很少遇到障礙，這並不奇怪。這一政策的典型例子是歐盟的申根協議，該協議在很大程度上消除了該機構大多數成員國之間的邊界。此外，歐盟原則上堅定地致力於向逃離麻煩地區的難民敞開大門。

在一個民族認同非常重要的世界裏，將不同的民族混合在一起（當有開放的邊界和寬容的難民政策時就會發生這種情況）通常會導致嚴重的麻煩。例如，移民似乎是英國選民支持英國脫歐的主要原因。他們尤其不滿東歐人利用歐盟的開放邊境政策輕易移民到英國。67 英國在這方麵也不例外，因為反移民情緒在歐洲普遍存在，並加劇了人們對歐盟的敵意。68 2015 年開始抵達歐洲的大批中東難民顯然沒有受到自由國際秩序中心國家所期望的那種歡迎。事實上，人們強烈反對接受這些難民，尤其是在東歐，在德國也是如此，德國總理默克爾最初歡迎這些難民，這在政治上傷害了自己。開放邊境和難民的麻煩不僅使人們對歐盟對自由價值觀的承諾產生了質疑，而且還在成員國之間造成了分歧——這些分歧動搖了這個古老機構的基礎。

超全球化的弊端
自由國際秩序建立後，經濟交流急劇增長，導致該體係中的自由國家內部出現重大經濟問題。這些問題反過來又引發了對這一秩序的強烈政治抵製。當這種情況發生在民主國家時，公眾很可能會反對自由主義精英，選出支持與自由主義原則相悖的政策的領導人。

當代國際經濟高度一體化，極具活力。變化以超光速發生，一個國家的重大發展必然會對其他國家產生重大影響。這種完全開放的體係帶來了相當大的好處。它在全球範圍內帶來了令人印象深刻的增長，幫助中國和印度等國家數百萬人擺脫了貧困，並為世界上最富有的人帶來了巨大的經濟利益。與此同時，它也造成了政府無力解決的重大問題，至少如果它們按照自由世界秩序的規則行事的話。理解這一現象的最好方法是將當今的超全球化與溫和的全球化進行比較。

1945 年至 20 世紀 80 年代末，布雷頓森林共識下取得了成功。69

布雷頓森林共識旨在促進開放的國際經濟，但僅限於一定程度。70 例如，跨國資本流動受到重大限製。盡管關貿總協定旨在促進國際貿易，但各國政府在符合自身利益的情況下，有相當大的回旋餘地采取保護主義政策。實際上，各國政府能夠推行不僅促進繁榮，而且保護其公民免受市場波動影響的政策。約翰·魯吉將市場與政府之間的這種關係稱為“嵌入式自由主義”。71 布雷頓森林共識在四十多年的時間裏運行良好，盡管到 20 世紀 80 年代末，它的日子已經屈指可數了。

超全球化在 20 世紀 80 年代開始受到關注，並在冷戰後加速發展，有效地推翻了布雷頓森林共識。新秩序主要由西方政策製定者創建，旨在通過取消對資本流動的控製並用世界貿易組織取代關貿總協定，大大減少對全球市場的監管。這個新的貿易組織於 1995 年開始運作，旨在開放全球市場，使各國政府推行保護主義政策變得尤為困難。正如丹尼·羅德裏克所說，“任何阻礙自由貿易的障礙都被視為應被消除的可憎之物；警告一概不予理睬。”72 從本質上講，幾乎任何形式的政府對世界經濟運作的幹預都被認為對自由國際秩序有害。再次引用羅德裏克的話：“國家從經濟增長的幫手變成了阻礙經濟增長的主要障礙。”73

超全球化及其不滿

超全球化造成了許多重大經濟問題，這些問題削弱了自由世界秩序在構成該係統核心的國家中的合法性。首先，外包導致一個國家經濟特定領域的許多工作崗位迅速消失，大量人員失業。74 有時整個地區的傳統經濟基礎都會被摧毀。失業者往往很難找到高薪工作，甚至根本找不到工作，其中許多人都是流動性很低的非技術工人。75 即使他們找到了好工作，也有可能再次失去工作，因為超全球化會帶來“創造性破壞”。即使是那些還沒有失業的人也擔心有一天自己會失業。簡而言之，世界經濟固有的活力不僅威脅著就業，而且還在世界各地的人們心中滋生了強烈的未來不確定性。

此外，超全球化對提高自由西方中下層階級的實際收入水平幾乎沒有起到什麽作用。與此同時，它還大大增加了上層階級的工資和財富。76 其結果是，幾乎所有地方都出現了驚人的經濟不平等，而且幾乎沒有任何緩解的跡象。77 事實上，這個問題似乎還會越來越嚴重。78 根據布雷頓森林共識，政府可以通過製定再分配稅收政策、工人培訓計劃和慷慨的福利待遇來很好地處理這類問題。但在自由國際秩序中，幾乎所有問題的解決方案都是讓市場來處理，而不是讓政府來處理，因為政府被認為是使全球經濟平穩運行的負擔，而不是資產。如果全球經濟需要製定規則來促進平穩運行，那麽最好依靠國際機構而不是政府。

當然，市場無法解決這些問題；事實上，它們首先導致了這些問題，而且如果國家沒有製定保護公民的政策，它們很可能會使這些問題變得更糟。正如人們所料，這些不斷惡化的問題導致人們對自由國際秩序普遍不滿，並促使各國政府采取保護主義經濟政策，從而破壞現有體係。特朗普在 2016 年總統競選中利用了這種對現有秩序的敵意，不僅抨擊國際機構，還為推行保護主義經濟政策辯護。他強調保護美國工人的重要性高於一切。在共和黨初選和大選中，他擊敗了捍衛自由國際秩序、反對保護主義的對手。79 自就任總統以來，特朗普一直朝著明顯的保護主義方向發展。最終，當市場與一個國家大量公民的深層利益發生衝突時，該國的政治將以破壞自由國際秩序的方式發展。

特朗普的政策還帶來了另一個重大問題

超全球化。資本跨境流動的便捷性和速度，加上自由主義世界秩序強調放鬆政府管製，使得該秩序容易引發特定國家或地區，甚至整個世界的大規模經濟危機。卡門·萊因哈特 (Carmen Reinhart) 和肯尼斯·羅戈夫 (Kenneth Rogoff) 寫道：“國際資本高度流動的時期，曾多次引發國際銀行業危機。”80 事實上，自 20 世紀 80 年代末超全球化開始紮根以來，已經發生了許多危機。81 最嚴重的是 1997-98 年的亞洲金融危機，這場危機險些蔓延至全球，以及 2007-08 年的全球金融危機，這是自 20 世紀 30 年代大蕭條以來最嚴重的經濟崩潰，在很大程度上使西方的自由國際秩序失去了合法性。82 鑒於資本的持續流動性，可能會發生更多此類危機，進一步削弱現有秩序，甚至可能導致其崩潰。

有必要就歐元說幾句，歐元是自由國際秩序的一個關鍵特征，盡管它嚴格意義上屬於歐洲機構。83 1999 年歐元成立時，它代表著在促進成員國貨幣聯盟方麵邁出了一大步，盡管當時沒有財政聯盟或政治聯盟來支撐歐元。當時的批評者預測，如果沒有財政和政治聯盟，歐元最終將受到嚴重問題的困擾。84 許多支持者認識到了這個問題，但認為貨幣聯盟最終將導致三個方麵的聯盟，從而消除問題。但這並沒有發生，歐元在 2009 年遭遇了第一次重大危機，不僅產生了經濟問題，還產生了政治問題。這場危機以及隨後的解決嚐試使歐洲的民族主義情緒浮出水麵。

歐盟在應對歐元區危機方麵遇到了很大困難，但問題最終通過歐洲中央銀行和美國政府等機構的大規模救助得到解決，盡管此前歐盟受到了重大的政治損害。但更重要的是，歐盟尚未在財政和政治聯盟方麵取得重大進展，這意味著這一解決方案隻是暫時的，未來幾年可能會出現更多危機，這將進一步破壞歐盟乃至整個自由國際秩序。

中國的崛起
超全球化還存在一個問題，與自由國家日益增長的對國際秩序的政治反對無關，而是與全球力量平衡息息相關。在 2017 年特朗普上台之前，西方精英們秉承著冷戰後與中國接觸而非遏製中國的政策，堅定地致力於將中國融入世界經濟，包括其所有主要經濟機構。他們認為，一個日益繁榮富裕的中國最終將成為一個自由民主國家和自由國際秩序的傑出成員。

然而，該政策的設計者沒有意識到，通過幫助加速中國的增長，他們實際上是在幫助破壞自由秩序，因為中國已經迅速成長為一個擁有強大軍事實力的經濟強國。實際上，它們幫助中國成為一個大國，從而削弱了單極體係，而單極體係對於維持自由世界秩序至關重要。俄羅斯的複興加劇了這一問題，俄羅斯雖然顯然很弱，但再次成為一個大國。隨著中國崛起和俄羅斯卷土重來，國際體係已經變得多極化，這對自由國際秩序來說是一個喪鍾。更糟糕的是，中國和俄羅斯都沒有成為自由民主國家。

即使中國和俄羅斯沒有成為大國，世界仍然是單極的，自由秩序今天仍會因其內在缺陷而分崩離析。唐納德·特朗普在總統競選期間尖銳而頻繁地批評後冷戰秩序的所有關鍵要素，他的當選證明了到 2016 年時自由世界秩序已經陷入了多大的困境。因此，如果國際體係仍然是單極的，那麽在特朗普總統的領導下，自由世界秩序將演變為不可知論秩序，因為現實主義秩序在單極體係中沒有立足之地。當然，沒有證據表明他致力於重塑現有的自由主義秩序。事實上，他似乎一心要破壞它。無論有沒有中國，自由主義國際秩序注定會失敗，因為它在誕生之初就存在致命缺陷。

摘要
上述各種因果過程都在顛覆自由主義國際秩序方麵發揮了重要作用。雖然每個過程都有不同的邏輯，但它們往往協同作用

例如，超全球化對中下層階級的負麵影響，加上民族主義者對移民的不滿和失去主權的感覺，激起了民粹主義者對自由秩序原則和實踐的強烈反對。事實上，這種憤怒往往針對從該秩序中受益並極力捍衛它的自由主義精英。當然，這種不滿情緒產生了重大的政治後果。它在美國和其他西方民主國家造成了深刻的政治分歧，導致了英國脫歐，幫助特朗普入主白宮，並助長了世界各地對民族主義領導人的支持。

我們走向何方？
人們可能會承認自由國際秩序正處於衰落的末期，但有人認為可以用一種更務實的版本取而代之，這種版本可以避免後冷戰秩序的過度行為。85 這種更溫和的自由秩序將采取一種更微妙、更溫和的方式來傳播自由民主，遏製超全球化，並對國際機構的權力施加一些重大限製。根據這一觀點，新秩序將類似於冷戰時期的西方秩序，盡管它將是全球性的和自由的，而不是有限製的和現實主義的。

然而，這種解決方案並不可行，因為單極時代已經結束，這意味著在可預見的未來，任何形式的自由國際秩序都不可能維持。此外，特朗普總統無意追求“自由主義”世界秩序，沒有他的支持，這一選擇就不可能實現。但即使特朗普不是障礙，國際體係仍是單極的，如果美國降低目標，試圖建立一個不那麽雄心勃勃的自由主義秩序，它也會失敗。事實上，它最終會建立一個不可知論的國際秩序。

用溫和或更被動的政策不可能建立一個有意義的自由主義全球秩序。這項事業需要在太多地方進行太多的社會工程。如果自由單極國家及其盟友有任何成功的機會（我認為沒有），他們必須堅持不懈地推行雄心勃勃的全球政策，這就是美國及其自由主義夥伴在冷戰後采取這種行動的原因。然而，由於過去的失敗，這種方法現在在政治上不可行。因此，自由民主國家別無選擇，隻能采取小步驟，按照自己的形象重塑世界，同時對世界上大多數國家采取寬容的態度。這種謙遜的態度將有效地產生一種不可知論的秩序。但這不會發生，因為這個體係是多極的，大國政治再次發揮作用。因此，關鍵問題是：什麽樣的現實主義秩序將主導新多極世界的格局？

新的現實主義秩序
在可預見的未來，可能會有三種不同的現實主義秩序：一個薄弱的國際秩序和兩個有界限的厚秩序——一個由中國領導，另一個由美國領導。新興的薄弱國際秩序將主要關注監督軍備控製協議和使全球經濟有效運轉。它還可能比過去更加關注與氣候變化有關的問題。從本質上講，構成國際秩序的機構將專注於促進國家間合作。相比之下，兩個有界秩序將主要關注彼此之間的安全競爭，盡管這需要促進每個秩序成員之間的合作。這兩個秩序之間將存在需要管理的重大經濟和軍事競爭，這就是為什麽它們將是厚秩序的原因。

新多極世界的兩個關鍵特征將深刻影響新興秩序。首先，假設中國繼續其令人矚目的崛起，它將與美國展開激烈的安全競爭，這將成為 21 世紀國際政治的核心特征。這種競爭將導致由中國和美國主導的有界秩序的產生。軍事聯盟將是這兩個秩序的核心組成部分，這兩個秩序現在開始形成，將類似於冷戰時期蘇聯和美國主導的秩序。

然而，北京和華盛頓有時會有理由在某些軍事問題上進行合作，這一努力將屬於國際秩序的範疇，就像冷戰期間一樣。同樣，重點將主要放在軍備控製協議上，將涉及俄羅斯、中國和美國。現有的處理擴散問題的條約和協議可能會繼續存在，因為三個大國都希望限製核武器的擴散。但北京

俄羅斯、莫斯科和華盛頓將不得不談判新的條約來限製各自的軍備，就像冷戰期間的超級大國所做的那樣。86 盡管如此，美國和中國主導的有限秩序將主要負責處理核心安全問題。

在軍事問題上，圍繞中美競爭建立的三個新興秩序應該與冷戰時期的三個秩序有明顯的相似之處，盡管中國取代了蘇聯。

然而，在經濟領域並不存在這樣的相似之處。在冷戰的大部分時間裏，超級大國或各自的秩序之間幾乎沒有經濟交流。因此，現有的國際秩序並沒有以任何有意義的方式關注促進雙方的經濟關係。經濟交往主要局限於有限秩序，其主要目標是推行有助於獲得優勢的政策。由於經濟實力是軍事實力的基礎，因此安全競爭在經濟和軍事領域都進行了。

經濟合作與競爭
如今，經濟形勢與冷戰時期大不相同，這導致了新多極化的第二個重要特征，它將塑造新興的秩序。中國和美國之間以及中國和美國在東亞的盟友之間有著大量的經濟交流。中國和美國還在世界各地進行貿易和投資。兩個有界秩序之間的安全競爭不太可能顯著減少這些經濟流動。87 持續貿易帶來的收益太大了。即使美國試圖限製與中國的貿易，北京也可以通過增加與其他夥伴（如歐洲）的貿易來彌補。換句話說，未來的歐洲很可能類似於第一次世界大戰前的歐洲，當時三國同盟（奧匈帝國、德國和意大利）和三國協約國（英國、法國和俄羅斯）之間存在激烈的安全競爭，但這六個國家之間以及整個歐洲內部的經濟互動非常多。

由於世界經濟仍將高度相互依存，新興國際秩序將在管理全球各國之間的經濟關係中發揮關鍵作用。盡管中國在幫助該秩序促進經濟合作方麵有著深厚的利益，但它將利用其日益增長的實力重塑新的國際秩序，使其對自己有利。它將尋求改寫該秩序現有經濟機構的規則，以賦予其更大的影響力，並將創建反映其日益增長的實力的新機構。88 後一種方法的一個突出例子是北京於 2015 年成立亞洲基礎設施投資銀行，一些觀察家認為該銀行是國際貨幣基金組織和世界銀行的潛在競爭對手。當然，這種情況與蘇聯在冷戰期間的表現有著根本的不同。

然而，這並不是經濟故事的結束，因為在全球層麵持續經濟合作的大背景下，兩個有界秩序之間肯定會存在激烈的經濟競爭。89 這種競爭在很大程度上將受到安全問題的驅動。畢竟，經濟實力是軍事實力的基礎，這意味著中國有強大的戰略動機去占據世界主導地位，而這正是它的目標。例如，“中國製造2025”就是北京的一項計劃，旨在主導全球各種高科技產品的市場。中國的策略是向國有企業提供大量政府補貼，並用從美國和其他西方公司竊取的技術補充其研究。”90 中國還利用其不斷增長的經濟實力，迫使其東亞鄰國站在北京一邊，反對華盛頓。91

當然，美國將反擊中國，這不僅是出於安全原因，也是因為美國商界不想輸給中國。92 特朗普政府對華嚴厲的經濟政策隻是美國主導和中國主導的秩序之間長期激烈競爭的開始。93 例如，美國肯定會試圖限製向中國轉讓兩用技術——可用於軍事目的的先進民用技術。它還將試圖管理與中國及其盟友的貿易和投資，以不削弱他們在權力平衡中的地位，並希望改善這種地位。

這兩個正在形成的有界秩序將包括旨在促進成員國之間經濟合作的機構，同時尋求獲得相對於對手秩序的經濟優勢。例如，奧巴馬政府明確設計了跨太平洋夥伴關係協定，目的是

其宗旨，盡管特朗普就任總統後放棄了這一宗旨。中國於 2013 年發起了雄心勃勃的“一帶一路”計劃，其目的不僅是幫助中國維持其驚人的經濟增長，而且還要向全球展示中國的軍事和政治實力。由於美國拒絕加入亞洲基礎設施開發銀行，這個令人印象深刻的機構很可能成為中國主導的有限秩序的核心部分。

簡而言之，中國主導的有限秩序和美國主導的有限秩序之間的競爭將涉及全麵的經濟和軍事競爭，就像冷戰期間莫斯科和華盛頓主導的有限秩序一樣。94 這次最大的不同是，國際秩序將深入參與管理全球經濟的合作方麵，而冷戰期間並非如此。95

俄羅斯和歐洲
俄羅斯呢？它當然是一個大國，這就是為什麽新興世界是多極的，而不是兩極的。但在可預見的未來，俄羅斯將是三大國中最弱的一個，除非美國或中國經濟遭遇重大的長期問題。關於俄羅斯的關鍵問題是：在中美競爭中，俄羅斯會站在哪一??邊？盡管俄羅斯現在與中國結盟，但隨著時間的推移，它很可能會改變立場，與美國結盟，因為鑒於兩國地理位置接近，日益強大的中國對俄羅斯的威脅更大。如果莫斯科和華盛頓因為共同懼怕中國而建立更緊密的關係，俄羅斯將鬆散地融入美國主導的有界秩序。如果莫斯科繼續與北京保持友好關係，因為它更懼怕美國而不是中國，俄羅斯將鬆散地融入中國主導的有界秩序。俄羅斯可能會試圖不與任何一方結盟，保持旁觀。96

最後，歐洲呢？歐洲大多數國家，尤其是主要大國，都可能成為美國主導的有限秩序的一部分，盡管它們不太可能在遏製中國方麵發揮重大軍事作用。它們沒有能力向東亞投射大規模軍事力量，也沒有理由獲得這種力量，因為中國並不直接威脅歐洲，而且歐洲將責任推給美國及其亞洲盟友更有意義。然而，美國政策製定者出於戰略相關的經濟原因，希望歐洲國家加入其有限秩序。特別是，美國希望阻止歐洲國家向中國出售軍民兩用技術，並在必要時幫助對北京施加經濟壓力。作為回報，美國軍隊將留在歐洲，保持北約的存在，並繼續充當該地區的撫慰者。鑒於幾乎每位歐洲領導人都希望看到這種情況發生，退出的威脅應該會給美國帶來重大籌碼，使歐洲國家在經濟方麵與中國合作。

Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order 

https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/43/4/7/12221/Bound-to-Fail-The-Rise-and-Fall-of-the-Liberal

John J. Mearsheimer  International Security (2019) 43 (4): 7–50. April 01 2019

https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00342

Abstract

The liberal international order, erected after the Cold War, was crumbling by 2019. It was flawed from the start and thus destined to fail. The spread of liberal democracy around the globe—essential for building that order—faced strong resistance because of nationalism, which emphasizes self-determination. Some targeted states also resisted U.S. efforts to promote liberal democracy for security-related reasons. Additionally, problems arose because a liberal order calls for states to delegate substantial decisionmaking authority to international institutions and to allow refugees and immigrants to move easily across borders. Modern nation-states privilege sovereignty and national identity, however, which guarantees trouble when institutions become powerful and borders porous. Furthermore, the hyperglobalization that is integral to the liberal order creates economic problems among the lower and middle classes within the liberal democracies, fueling a backlash against that order. Finally, the liberal order accelerated China's rise, which helped transform the system from unipolar to multipolar. A liberal international order is possible only in unipolarity. The new multipolar world will feature three realist orders: a thin international order that facilitates cooperation, and two bounded orders—one dominated by China, the other by the United States—poised for waging security competition between them.

Introduction

By 2019, it was clear that the liberal international order was in deep trouble. The tectonic plates that underpin it are shifting, and little can be done to repair and rescue it. Indeed, that order was destined to fail from the start, as it contained the seeds of its own destruction.

The fall of the liberal international order horrifies the Western elites who built it and who have benefited from it in many ways.1 These elites fervently believe that this order was and remains an important force for promoting peace and prosperity around the globe. Many of them blame President Donald Trump for its demise. After all, he expressed contempt for the liberal order when campaigning for president in 2016; and since taking office, he has pursued policies that seem designed to tear it down.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that the liberal international order is in trouble solely because of Trump's rhetoric or policies. In fact, more fundamental problems are at play, which account for why Trump has been able to successfully challenge an order that enjoys almost universal support among the foreign policy elites in the West. The aim of this article is to determine why the liberal world order is in big trouble and to identify the kind of international order that will replace it.

I offer three main sets of arguments. First, because states in the modern world are deeply interconnected in a variety of ways, orders are essential for facilitating efficient and timely interactions. There are different kinds of international orders, and which type emerges depends primarily on the global distribution of power. But when the system is unipolar, the political ideology of the sole pole also matters. Liberal international orders can arise only in unipolar systems where the leading state is a liberal democracy.

Second, the United States has led two different orders since World War II. The Cold War order, which is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a “liberal international order,” was neither liberal nor international. It was a bounded order that was limited mainly to the West and was realist in all its key dimensions. It had certain features that were also consistent with a liberal order, but those attributes were based on realist logic. The U.S.-led post–Cold War order, on the other hand, is liberal and international, and thus differs in fundamental ways from the bounded order the United States dominated during the Cold War.

Third, the post–Cold War liberal international order was doomed to collapse, because the key policies on which it rested are deeply flawed. Spreading liberal democracy around the globe, which is of paramount importance for building such an order, not only is extremely difficult, but often poisons relations with other countries and sometimes leads to disastrous wars. Nationalism within the target state is the main obstacle to the promotion of democracy, but balance of power politics also function as an important blocking force.

Furthermore, the liberal order's tendency to privilege international institutions over domestic considerations, as well as its deep commitment to porous, if not open borders, has had toxic political effects inside the leading liberal states themselves, including the U.S. unipole. Those policies clash with nationalism over key issues such as sovereignty and national identity. Because nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet, it invariably trumps liberalism whenever the two clash, thus undermining the order at its core.

In addition, hyperglobalization, which sought to minimize barriers to global trade and investment, resulted in lost jobs, declining wages, and rising income inequality throughout the liberal world. It also made the international financial system less stable, leading to recurring financial crises. Those troubles then morphed into political problems, further eroding support for the liberal order.

A hyperglobalized economy undermines the order in yet another way: it helps countries other than the unipole grow more powerful, which can undermine unipolarity and bring the liberal order to an end. This is what is happening with the rise of China, which, along with the revival of Russian power, has brought the unipolar era to a close. The emerging multipolar world will consist of a realist-based international order, which will play an important role in managing the world economy, dealing with arms control, and handling problems of the global commons such as climate change. In addition to this new international order, the United States and China will lead bounded orders that will compete with each other in both the economic and military realms.2

The remainder of this article is organized as follows. First, I explain what the term “order” means and why orders are an important feature of international politics. Second, I describe the different kinds of orders and the circumstances under which a liberal international order will emerge. Relatedly, I examine in the third section what accounts for the rise and decline of international orders. In the fourth section, I describe the different Cold War orders. In the next three sections, I recount the history of the liberal international order. Then, in the subsequent four sections, I explain why it failed. In the penultimate section, I discuss what the new order will look like under multipolarity. The conclusion provides a brief summary of my argument and some policy recommendations.

What Is an Order and Why Do Orders Matter?

An “order” is an organized group of international institutions that help govern the interactions among the member states.3 Orders can also help member states deal with nonmembers, because an order does not necessarily include every country in the world. Furthermore, orders can comprise institutions that have a regional or a global scope. Great powers create and manage orders.

International institutions, which are the building blocks of orders, are effectively rules that the great powers devise and agree to follow, because they believe that obeying those rules is in their interest. The rules prescribe acceptable kinds of behavior and proscribe unacceptable forms of behavior.4 Unsurprisingly, the great powers write those rules to suit their own interests. But when the rules do not accord with the vital interests of the dominant states, those same states either ignore them or rewrite them. For example, President George W. Bush emphasized on numerous occasions before the 2003 Iraq War that even if a U.S. invasion violated international law, “America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation's security … I will not wait on events, while dangers gather.”5

An order can contain different kinds of institutions, including security institutions such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), or the Warsaw Pact, as well as economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the World Bank. It can also include institutions that deal with the environment, such as the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change, and more multifaceted institutions such as the European Union (EU), the League of Nations, and the United Nations (UN).

Orders are indispensable in the modern international system for two reasons. First, they manage interstate relations in a highly interdependent world.6 States engage in enormous amounts of economic activity, which leads them to establish institutions and rules that can regulate those interactions and make them more efficient. But that interdependence is not restricted to economic affairs; it also includes environmental and health issues. Pollution in one country, for example, invariably affects the environment in neighboring countries, while the effects of global warming are universal and can be dealt with only through multilateral measures. Moreover, deadly diseases do not need passports to cross international boundaries, as the lethal influenza pandemic of 1918–20 made clear.

States are also interconnected in the military realm, which leads them to form alliances. To present an adversary with a formidable deterrent or to fight effectively should deterrence break down, allies benefit from having rules that stipulate how each member's military will operate and how they will coordinate with each other. The need for coordination is magnified because modern militaries possess a vast array of weapons, not all of which are compatible with their allies’ weaponry. Consider the wide variety of weapons in the militaries that made up NATO and the Warsaw Pact, not to mention the difficulty of coordinating the movements of the various fighting forces inside those alliances. It is unsurprising that both superpowers maintained heavily institutionalized alliances—and indeed heavily institutionalized orders—during the Cold War.

Second, orders are indispensable in the modern international system because they help the great powers manage the behavior of the weaker states in ways that suit the great powers’ interests.7 Specifically, the most powerful states design institutions to constrain the actions of less powerful states and then put significant pressure on them to join those institutions and obey the rules no matter what. Nevertheless, those rules often work to the benefit of the weaker states in the system.

A good example of this phenomenon is the superpowers’ efforts during the Cold War to build a nonproliferation regime. Toward that end, in 1968 the Soviet Union and the United States devised the NPT, which effectively made it illegal for any member state that did not have nuclear weapons to acquire them. Naturally, the leadership in Moscow and Washington went to great lengths to get as many states as possible to join the NPT. The superpowers were also the main driving force behind the formation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group in 1974, which aims to place significant limits on the sale of nuclear materials and technologies to countries that do not possess nuclear weapons, but might attempt to acquire them in the market.

The institutions that make up an order, however, cannot compel powerful states to obey the rules if those states believe that doing so is not in their interest. International institutions, in other words, do not take on a life of their own, and thus do not have the power to tell the leading states what to do. They are simply tools of the great powers. Still, rules, which are the essence of any institution, help manage the behavior of states, and great powers obey the rules most of the time.

The bottom line is that in a world of multifaceted interdependence, a system of rules is necessary to lower transaction costs and help carry out the multitude of interactions that take place among states. Adm. Harry Harris, a former commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific, captures this point when he referred to the liberal international order as the “Global Operating System.”8

Types of Orders

There are three important distinctions among the orders that populate the international system. The first difference is between international orders and bounded orders. For an order to be international, it must include all of the world's great powers. Ideally, it would contain every country in the system. In contrast, bounded orders consist of a set of institutions that have limited membership. They do not include all of the great powers, and they are usually regional in scope. In most cases, they are dominated by a single great power, although it is possible for two or more great powers to form a bounded order, provided at least one great power remains outside of it. In short, international and bounded orders are created and run by great powers.

International orders are concerned mainly with facilitating cooperation between states. Specifically, they help foster cooperation either among the great powers in the system or among virtually all the countries in the world. Bounded orders, on the other hand, are designed mainly to allow rival great powers to wage security competition with each other, not to advance cooperation between them. Nevertheless, great powers that lead bounded orders work hard to foster cooperation among the member states, coercing them if necessary. High levels of cooperation within the bounded order are essential for waging security competition with opposing great powers. Lastly, international orders are a constant feature of contemporary international politics, whereas bounded orders are not. Only realist international orders are accompanied by bounded orders.

The second major distinction concerns the different kinds of international orders that great powers can organize: realist, agnostic, or ideological (to include liberal). Which order takes hold depends primarily on the distribution of power among the great powers. The key issue is whether the system is bipolar, multipolar, or unipolar. If it is unipolar, the political ideology of the dominant state also matters for determining the kind of international order that forms. In bipolarity and multipolarity, however, the political ideology of the great powers is largely irrelevant.

REALIST ORDERS

The international order—and the institutions that make it up—will be realist if the system is either bipolar or multipolar. The reason is simple: if there are two or more great powers in the world, they have little choice but to act according to realist dictates and engage in security competition with each other. Their aim is to gain power at the expense of their adversaries, but if that is not possible, to make sure that the balance of power does not shift against them. Ideological considerations are subordinated to security considerations in these circumstances. That would be true even if all the great powers were liberal states.9 Nevertheless, rival great powers sometimes have an incentive to cooperate. After all, they operate in a highly interdependent world, where they are sure to have some common interests.

Bounded and international orders, which operate side by side in a realist world, help opposing great powers compete and cooperate among themselves. Specifically, the great powers establish their own bounded orders to help wage security competition with each other. In contrast, they organize international orders to facilitate cooperation between themselves and often with other countries as well. The institutions that make up an international order are well suited for helping great powers reach agreements when those states have common interests. This concern with cooperation notwithstanding, the great powers are still rivals whose relationship is competitive at its core. Balance of power considerations are always at play, even when great powers work through international institutions to cooperate with each other. In particular, no great power is going to sign an agreement that diminishes its power.

The institutions that make up these realist orders—be they international or bounded—might sometimes have features that are consistent with liberal values, but this is not evidence that the order is liberal. Those features just happen to also make sense from a balance of power perspective. For example, the key economic institutions inside a bounded order might be oriented to facilitate free trade among the member states, not because of liberal calculations, but because economic openness is considered the best way to generate economic and military power inside that order. Indeed, if abandoning free trade and moving toward a more closed economic system made good strategic sense, that would happen in a realist order.

AGNOSTIC AND IDEOLOGICAL ORDERS

If the world is unipolar, the international order cannot be realist. Unipolarity has only one great power, and thus by definition there can be no security competition between great powers, which is a sine qua non of any realist world order. Consequently, the sole pole has little reason to create a bounded order. After all, bounded orders are mainly designed for waging security competition with other great powers, which is irrelevant in unipolarity. Nevertheless, some of the institutions in that nonrealist international order might be regional in scope, whereas others will be truly global in terms of their membership. None of those regional institutions, however, would be bundled together to form a bounded order; they would instead be either loosely or tightly linked with the other institutions in the prevailing international order.

In unipolarity, an international order can take one of two forms—agnostic or ideological—depending on the political ideology of the leading state. The key issue is whether the unipole has a universalistic ideology, one that assumes that its core values and its political system should be exported to other countries. If the unipole makes this assumption, the world order will be ideological. The sole pole, in other words, will try to spread its ideology far and wide and remake the world in its own image. It would be well positioned to pursue that mission, because there are no rival great powers with which it must compete.

Liberalism, of course, contains within it a powerful universalistic strand, which stems from its emphasis on the importance of individual rights. The liberal story, which is individualistic at its core, maintains that every person has a set of inalienable or natural rights. As such, liberals tend to be deeply concerned about the rights of people all around the world, regardless of which country they live in. Thus, if the unipole is a liberal democracy, it is almost certain to try to create an international order that aims to reshape the world in its own image.10

What does a liberal international order look like? The dominant state in the system obviously must be a liberal democracy and must have enormous influence within the key institutions that populate the order. Furthermore, there must be a substantial number of other liberal democracies in the system and a largely open world economy. The ultimate goal of these liberal democracies, especially the leading one, is to spread democracy across the globe, while promoting greater economic intercourse and building increasingly powerful and effective international institutions. In essence, the aim is to create a world order consisting exclusively of liberal democracies that are economically engaged with each other and bound together by sets of common rules. The underlying assumption is that such an order will be largely free of war and will generate prosperity for all of its member states.

Communism is another universalistic ideology that could serve as the basis for building an ideological international order. Indeed, Marxism shares some important similarities with liberalism. As John Gray puts it, “Both were enlightened ideologies that look forward to universal civilization.”11 Both liberalism and communism, in other words, are bent on transforming the world. Communism's universalistic dimension is based on the concept of class, not rights. Marx and his followers maintain that social classes transcend national groups and state borders. Most importantly, they argue that capitalist exploitation has helped foster a powerful bond among the working classes in different countries. Hence, if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War and had felt the kind of enthusiasm for Marxism in 1989 that the United States felt for liberal democracy, Soviet leaders surely would have tried to build a communist international order.

If the unipole does not have a universalistic ideology, and therefore is not committed to imposing its political values and governing system on other countries, the international order would be agnostic.12 The dominant power would still target regimes that challenged its authority and would still be deeply involved in both managing the institutions that make up the international order and molding the world economy to fit with its own interests. It would not, however, be committed to shaping local politics on a global scale. The sole pole would instead be more tolerant and pragmatic in its dealings with other countries. If Russia, with its present political system, were ever to become a unipole, the international system would be agnostic, as Russia is not driven by a universalistic ideology. The same is true of China, where the regime's principal source of legitimacy is nationalism, not communism.13 This is not to deny that some aspects of communism still have political importance for China's rulers, but the leadership in Beijing displays little of the missionary zeal that usually comes with communism.14

THICK AND THIN ORDERS

So far, I have distinguished between international and bounded orders, and I have divided international orders into realist, agnostic, and ideological kinds. A third way to categorize orders—be they international or bounded—is to focus on the breadth and depth of their coverage of the most important areas of state activity. Regarding breadth, the central question is whether an order has some effect on the key economic and military activities of its member states. Concerning depth, the main question is whether the institutions in the order exert significant influence on the actions of its member states. In other words, does the order have strong and effective institutions?

With these two dimensions in mind, one can distinguish between thick orders and thin orders. A thick or robust order comprises institutions that have a substantial effect on state behavior in both the economic and military realms. Such an order is broad and deep. A thin order, on the other hand, can take three basic forms. First, it might deal with only the economic or military domain, but not both. Even if that realm contained strong institutions, it would still be categorized as a thin order. Second, an order might deal with one or even both realms, but contain weak institutions. Third, it is possible, but unlikely, that an order will be involved with economic and military matters, but will have strong institutions in only one of those areas. In short, a thin order is either not broad, not deep at all, or deep in only one of the two crucial realms. Figure 1 summarizes the different categories of orders employed in this article.

Figure 1.

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A Typology of Orders

The Rise and Decline of International Orders

No international order lasts forever, which raises the question: What explains the demise of an existing order and the rise of a new one? The same two factors that account for the prevailing order, the distribution of power and the leading state's political ideology, explain the fall of realist and agnostic orders as well as the kind of order that replaces them. While those same factors also help explain the dissolution of ideological orders, two other factors, nationalism and balance of power politics, usually play the central role in causing their collapse.

Realist orders, which are based on either bipolarity or multipolarity, collapse when the underlying distribution of power changes in fundamental ways. If the international system shifts from bipolarity to multipolarity or vice versa, or if the number of great powers in a multipolar system decreases or increases, the resulting order remains realist, although different in its configuration. Regardless of the number of great powers in the system, they still must compete with each other for power and influence. But if bipolarity or multipolarity gives way to unipolarity, the new order will be either agnostic or ideological, depending on whether or not the sole pole is committed to a universalistic ideology.

Realist orders tend to have significant staying power, because major shifts in the balance of power are usually the result of differential economic growth among the great powers over a long period of time. Great power wars, however, can sometimes lead to a swift change in the global distribution of power, although such events are rare.15 After World War II, for example, the system shifted from multipolar to bipolar, largely because of the total defeat of Germany and Japan and the terrible price the war exacted on Britain and France. The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as the two poles. Moreover, when realist orders change, they usually give way to newly configured realist orders—as happened after World War II—simply because unipolarity is rare.

Agnostic orders also tend to have substantial staying power, because the unipole accepts the heterogeneity that is inherent in political and social life and does not try to micromanage the politics of nearly every country on the planet. That kind of pragmatic behavior helps preserve, if not augment, the hegemon's power. An agnostic order is likely to meet its end when unipolarity gives way to either bipolarity or multipolarity, making the order realist; or if the sole pole experiences a revolution at home and adopts a universalistic ideology, which would surely lead it to forge an ideological order.

By contrast, any ideological international order based on a universalistic ideology, such as liberalism or communism, is destined to have a short life span, mainly because of the domestic and global difficulties that arise when the unipole seeks to remake the world in its own image. Nationalism and balance of power politics work to undermine the requisite social engineering in countries targeted for regime change, while nationalism also creates significant problems on the home front for the sole pole and its ideological allies. When such problems emerge, the unipole is likely to give up trying to remake the world in its own image, in effect abandoning its efforts to export its ideology abroad. It might even forsake that ideology altogether. When that happens, the order stops being ideological and becomes agnostic.

An ideological order can also come to an end in a second way. New great powers could emerge, which would undermine unipolarity and lead to either a bipolar or a multipolar system. In that event, the ideological order would be replaced by bounded and international realist orders.

The Cold War Orders, 1945–89

The global distribution of power from 1945 to 1989 was bipolar, which led to the formation of three principal political orders. There was an overarching international order that was largely created and maintained by the Soviet Union and the United States for purposes of facilitating cooperation between them when they had common interests. This emphasis on cooperation notwithstanding, it was not a liberal order, as the superpowers were engaged in intense rivalry throughout the Cold War, and the order they created was fully consistent with the security interests of both sides. Moreover, the Soviet Union was not a liberal democracy, and indeed Moscow and Washington were ideological adversaries. There were also two bounded orders, one largely confined to the West and dominated by the United States, the other consisting mainly of the world's communist countries and dominated by the Soviet Union. They were created by the superpowers for purposes of waging security competition with each other.

The international order that existed during the Cold War was a thin one, as it did not have a pronounced influence on the behavior of states—especially the great powers—in either the economic or military realm. Because the West and the communist world engaged in only minimal economic intercourse during the Cold War, there was little need to build institutions to help manage their economic dealings.16 Militarily, however, the story was more complicated. Given that the United States and the Soviet Union were bitter foes that competed for power, they concentrated on building thick bounded orders to help wage that struggle. Thus, the main military institutions that each superpower created—NATO and the Warsaw Pact—were not international in scope. They were instead the key elements in the U.S.-led and Soviet-led bounded orders.

Nevertheless, the United States and the Soviet Union sometimes had good reasons to cooperate and negotiate arms control agreements that served their mutual interests. Most importantly, they worked together to craft institutions designed to prevent nuclear proliferation. They also reached agreements aimed at limiting the arms race so as to save money, ban destabilizing weapons, and avoid competition in areas such as Antarctica. Finally, they concluded agreements aimed at establishing “rules of the road” and confidence-building measures. In the process, Moscow and Washington helped strengthen the Cold War international order, although it remained a thin order.

Both superpowers opposed further proliferation as soon as they acquired the bomb. Although the United States tested the first atomic weapon in 1945 and the Soviet Union followed suit in 1949, they did not put in place a set of institutions that could seriously limit the spread of nuclear weapons until the mid-1970s. The first step forward was the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1957. Its primary mission is to promote the civilian use of nuclear energy, but with safeguards that ensure that states receiving nuclear materials and technologies for peaceful purposes do not use them to build a bomb. The key institutions that the superpowers devised to curb proliferation are the NPT and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which, along with the International Atomic Energy Agency, markedly slowed the spread of nuclear weapons after 1975.

The United States and the Soviet Union also began pursuing an arms control agreement in the late 1960s that would put limits on their strategic nuclear arsenals. The result was the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which capped the number of strategic nuclear weapons each side could deploy (although at very high levels) and severely restricted the development of anti-ballistic missile systems. Moscow and Washington signed the SALT II Treaty in 1979, which put further limits on each side's strategic nuclear arsenal, although neither side ratified it. The superpowers worked on a follow-on agreement, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, during the 1980s, but it was not put into effect until after the Cold War ended. The other significant arms control agreement was the 1988 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated all short-range and intermediate-range missiles from the Soviet and U.S. arsenals.

The superpowers negotiated a host of other less significant security agreements and treaties that were also part of the Cold War international order. They include the Antarctic Treaty System (1959), the Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963), the Moscow-Washington Hot Line (1963), the Outer Space Treaty (1967), the Seabed Arms Control Treaty (1971), the U.S.-Soviet Incidents at Sea Agreement (1972), the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (1973), the Biological Weapons Convention (1975), and the Helsinki Accords (1975). There were some agreements that were reached during the Cold War, such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which was signed in 1982, but not ratified and put into effect until 1994, five years after the Cold War ended.

The UN was probably the most visible institution in the Cold War international order, but it had little influence on the behavior of countries around the world, mainly because the rivalry between the superpowers made it almost impossible for that institution to adopt and enforce consequential policies.

In addition to this thin international order, the superpowers each built a thick bounded order to help wage the Cold War. The Soviet-led order included institutions that dealt with economic, military, and ideological matters.17 The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), for example, was established in 1949 to facilitate trade between the Soviet Union and the communist states in Eastern Europe. The Warsaw Pact was a military alliance founded in 1955 to counter NATO after NATO's member states decided to invite West Germany to join the alliance. The Pact also helped Moscow keep its Eastern European allies in line. Finally, the Soviets created the Communist Information Bureau in 1947 as a successor to the Communist International. Both were designed to coordinate the efforts of communist parties around the world, mainly for the purpose of allowing the Soviets to purvey their policy views to their ideological brethren. The Communist Information Bureau was dissolved in 1956.

The bounded Western order was dominated by the United States, which shaped it to suit its own interests. It encompassed a host of economic institutions such as the IMF (1945), the World Bank (1945), the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT, 1947), the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom, 1950), and the European Community (EC, 1950), as well as NATO on the security front. Although the liberal United States dominated this bounded order, which also included a number of other liberal democracies, it was a realist order from top to bottom. Its primary mission was to create a powerful West that could contain and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union and its allies.

This emphasis on security notwithstanding, generating prosperity was an important end in itself for the countries in this bounded order. Moreover, there were some aspects of this realist order that are compatible with liberal principles. For instance, there is little doubt that ceteris paribus U.S. policymakers preferred dealing with democracies to authoritarian states. But promoting democracy always yielded when it conflicted with the dictates of balance of power politics. The United States did not preclude non-democracies from joining NATO or throw out countries that abandoned democracy once they joined, as the cases of Greece, Portugal, and Turkey illustrate.

Moreover, although Washington tended to favor economic policies that encouraged free trade and investment among the order's members, those policies were guided foremost by strategic considerations. As Joanne Gowa notes, “That the East-West conflict drove the United States to merge the high politics of security and the low politics of trade is a theme that emerges repeatedly in the work of those scholars who both defined and developed the subfield of international political economy.”18 In fact, the Dwight Eisenhower administration, which generally believed that free trade is the best way to create economic and military might, was prepared in the mid-1950s to allow the EC to become a closed economic bloc—that is, to undermine free trade—because it thought that an illiberal arrangement of this kind would make Western Europe a more powerful partner in the Cold War.19 Furthermore, the Marshall Plan was motivated mainly by strategic considerations. And as Sebastian Rosato shows, power politics underpinned the making of the EC, the forerunner of the EU.20

The Liberal International Order, 1990–2019

After the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States was by far the most powerful country in the world. The “unipolar moment” had arrived, which meant that most of the constraints that arise from security competition between great powers were gone.21 Moreover, the thick Western order that the United States had created to deal with the Soviet Union remained firmly intact, while the Soviet order quickly fell apart. Comecon and the Warsaw Pact dissolved in the summer of 1991, and the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991. Unsurprisingly, President George H.W. Bush decided to take the realist Western order and spread it across the globe, transforming it into a liberal international order. The institutions that had made up the thin Cold War–era international order—the UN and the various arms control agreements—would be incorporated into what Bush called the “new world order.”22

This remarkably ambitious endeavor enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the liberal democracies in East Asia and especially Western Europe, although there was never any doubt that the United States was in charge. As Bush put it in 1990, “There is no substitute for American leadership.”23 Or as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and President Barack Obama liked to say, the United States is “the indispensable nation.”24 In essence, Bush and his successors in the White House were bent on creating a new international order that was fundamentally different from the Western order that had existed during the Cold War. Specifically, they were committed to transforming a bounded realist order into an international liberal order.25 Indeed, Bill Clinton made it clear when he ran for president in 1992 that his predecessor's concept of a new world order was not ambitious enough.26

Creating a liberal international order involved three main tasks. First, it was essential to expand the membership in the institutions that made up the Western order, as well as erect new institutions where necessary. In other words, it was important to build a web of international institutions with universal membership that wielded great influence over the behavior of the member states. Second, it was imperative to create an open and inclusive international economy that maximized free trade and fostered unfettered capital markets. This hyperglobalized world economy was intended to be much more ambitious in scope than the economic order that prevailed in the West during the Cold War. Third, it was crucial to vigorously spread liberal democracy around the world, a mission that was frequently shortchanged when the United States was competing for power with the Soviet Union. This goal was not the United States’ alone; its European allies generally embraced this undertaking as well.27

These three tasks, of course, are directly tied to the principal liberal theories of peace: liberal institutionalism, economic interdependence theory, and democratic peace theory. Thus, in the minds of its architects, constructing a robust, sustainable liberal international order was synonymous with creating a peaceful world. This deep-seated belief gave the United States and its allies a powerful incentive to work assiduously to create that new order. Integrating China and Russia into it was especially important for its success, because they were the most powerful states in the system after the United States. The goal was to embed them in as many institutions as possible, fully integrate them into the open international economy, and help turn them into liberal democracies.

NATO expansion into Eastern Europe is a good example of the United States and its allies working to turn the bounded Western order into a liberal international order.28 One might think that moving NATO eastward was part of a classic deterrence strategy aimed at containing a potentially aggressive Russia.29 But it was not, as the West's strategy was geared toward liberal ends. The objective was to integrate the countries of Eastern Europe—and maybe, one day, Russia as well—into the “security community” that had developed in Western Europe during the Cold War. There is no evidence that its chief architects—Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama—thought that Russia might invade its neighbors and thus needed to be contained, or that they thought Russian leaders had legitimate reasons for fearing NATO enlargement.30

This liberal approach to NATO expansion is reflected in how the Clinton administration sold that policy to the U.S. and West European publics. For example, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott argued in 1995 that embedding the countries of Eastern Europe in NATO—as well as the European Union—was the key to producing stability in that potentially volatile region. “Enlargement of NATO,” Talbott argued, “would be a force for the rule of law both within Europe's new democracies and among them.” Moreover, it would “promote and consolidate democratic and free market values,” which would further contribute to peace.31

The United States based its policy toward China in the post–Cold War period on the same liberal logic. For example, Secretary of State Albright maintained that the key to sustaining peaceful relations with a rising China is to engage with it, not try to contain it the way the United States had sought to do with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Engagement, Albright claimed, would lead to China's active membership in some of the world's major institutions and help integrate it into the U.S.-led economic order, which would inevitably help turn China into a liberal democracy. China would then be a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system, highly motivated to maintain peaceful relations with other countries.32

The Bush Doctrine, which was developed over the course of 2002 and used to justify the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, is a third example of a major U.S. policy aimed at building a liberal international order. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration concluded that winning the so-called global war on terror required not only defeating al-Qaida, but also confronting countries such as Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The administration's key operating assumption was that the regimes in these purported rogue states were closely tied to terrorist organizations such as al-Qaida, were bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, and might even give them to terrorists.33 The best way to deal with proliferation and terrorism, the administration reasoned, was to turn all the countries in the Greater Middle East into liberal democracies, which would transform that region into a giant zone of peace, thereby eliminating the twin problems of proliferation and terrorism.34 “The world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values,” President Bush declared, “because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life.”35

It appeared to many observers in the early 1990s that the United States was well situated to construct a liberal international order. It had abundant experience building and running the Western order during the Cold War, and it was remarkably powerful compared to its potential rivals. China was in the early stages of its rise, and Russia was in a state of complete disarray, which remained the case throughout the 1990s. This huge power advantage meant that the unipole could largely ignore realist dictates and act according to liberal principles, which was impossible during the Cold War. It also meant that the United States could coax or coerce other states into following its edicts. And of course, there was always the possibility that Washington would use force to get its way.

Finally, the United States and its allies had abundant legitimacy in the years immediately after the Cold War ended. Not only did they win that protracted conflict, but there seemed to be no viable alternative to liberal democracy, which looked like the optimal political order for the foreseeable future. It was widely believed in the West at the time that eventually almost every country in the world would become a liberal democracy—a belief that led Francis Fukuyama to conclude that this might be “the end of history.”36 Moreover, the wide array of international institutions that had helped produce abundant prosperity in the West during the Cold War appeared to be ideally suited to take globalization to the next step. In essence, it looked like the United States was well positioned to pursue liberal hegemony, a foreign policy that called for building a world order based on liberal principles.37

During the 1990s and the early 2000s, the United States and its close allies appeared to be well on their way to fashioning a full-scale liberal international order. There were certainly problems, but generally speaking the emerging order was working nicely. Few people expected that it would begin to unravel a few years into the new millennium, but that is what happened.

The Golden Years, 1990–2004

Efforts by the United States and its allies to integrate China and Russia into the order's key economic institutions after the Cold War ended were generally successful. Russia joined the IMF and the World Bank in 1992, although it did not join the World Trade Organization (WTO) until 2012. China had been a member of the IMF and the World Bank since 1980, when it took Taiwan's place in those institutions. China joined the WTO in 2001. Despite a minor crisis over Taiwan in 1997, Beijing and Washington were otherwise on good terms throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Engagement appeared to be working. Relations between Moscow and Washington also fared well during this period.

The story in Europe was also positive. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty was a major step in promoting European integration, and in 1999 the euro made its debut, which was widely seen as evidence that the EU had a bright future. Furthermore, the early waves of EU and NATO expansion into Eastern Europe occurred with few problems, although Russian policymakers made their opposition clear. Finally, both Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union broke apart peacefully. Yugoslavia did not, however, resulting in wars over Bosnia and Kosovo, which the United States and its NATO allies were slow to respond to and bring to an end. But a cold peace was eventually imposed on the Balkans by 1999.

Developments in the Greater Middle East were more mixed, but even there it appeared that the region was slowly but steadily being incorporated into the liberal international order. Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords in September 1993, giving hope that the two sides might find a peaceful solution to their conflict by the end of the decade. The United States, operating with a UN Security Council mandate, led a broad coalition of allies to a stunning military victory over Iraq in early 1991—liberating Kuwait, significantly weakening Iraq's military, and exposing Saddam Hussein's secret nuclear weapons program, which was then shut down. Nevertheless, the Baathist regime maintained power. Afghanistan also remained a trouble spot, mainly because the Taliban allowed al-Qaida to plan its operations there, including the September 11 terrorist attacks, without interference. The events of that day, however, prompted the United States to invade Afghanistan in October 2001 and topple the Taliban, putting in its place a pro-Western regime. Then, in March 2003, the U.S. military conquered Iraq and removed Saddam from power. It appeared by the summer of 2003 that the Bush Doctrine, which aimed to spread democracy across the Greater Middle East, was going to work as intended.

Democracy was clearly on the march in the wake of the Cold War, seemingly confirming Fukuyama's claim that there was no viable alternative to it. According to Freedom House, 34 percent of the countries in the world were democracies in 1986. That figure jumped to 41 percent by 1996 and then 47 percent by 2006.38 On the economic front, hyperglobalization was generating abundant wealth around the globe, although there was a major financial crisis in Asia in 1997–98. In addition, interest was growing in prosecuting human rights violators, leading a prominent scholar to write a book titled The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics.39 On the proliferation front, South Africa abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 1989, while in the mid-1990s, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine gave up the nuclear arsenals they had inherited from the Soviet Union and joined the NPT. North Korea, which was on its way to developing nuclear weapons in the early 1990s, agreed in 1994 to terminate its program.

The United States and its allies did face some setbacks during the 1990s. India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in 1998; the Clinton administration suffered policy failures in Somalia (1993) and Haiti (1994–95); and it reacted too slowly to the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The United States also failed to end deadly wars in Congo and Sudan, while al-Qaida grew more dangerous within the confines of Afghanistan. Still, one could make a strong case that enormous progress had been made in a short time in spreading the liberal international order across the globe and that the United States and its allies would eventually be able to integrate troubled countries in Africa and elsewhere into the new order and make further strides in rolling back proliferation.

The Liberal Order Goes Downhill, 2005–19

Midway through the first decade of the 2000s, serious cracks began to appear in the liberal international order, which have since steadily widened. Consider what has happened in the Greater Middle East. By 2005, it was evident that the Iraq War was becoming a disaster, and the United States had no strategy for stopping the fighting, much less turning Iraq into a liberal democracy. At the same time, the situation in Afghanistan began to deteriorate, as the Taliban came back from the dead and took aim at the U.S.-installed government in Kabul. The Taliban has grown stronger with time, and the war in Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S. history, lasting longer than the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. Moreover, there is no apparent path to victory for the United States. In addition, Washington and its allies pursued regime change in Libya and Syria, which ended up helping precipitate deadly civil wars in both countries. Furthermore, in the process of helping wreck Iraq and Syria, the Bush and Obama administrations played a crucial role in creating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which the United States went to war against in 2014.

The Oslo Peace Process, which once seemed so promising, has failed, and the Palestinians have virtually no hope of acquiring their own state. With Washington's help, Israeli leaders are instead creating a Greater Israel, which, as two former Israeli prime ministers have said, will be an apartheid state.40 The United States is also contributing to the death and destruction in the civil war in Yemen, and gave its consent when the Egyptian military overthrew a democratically elected government in Egypt in 2013. Far from incorporating the Greater Middle East into the liberal international order, the United States and its allies inadvertently have played a central role in spreading illiberal disorder in that region.

Europe, which appeared to be the brightest star in the liberal galaxy during the 1990s, was in serious trouble by the late 2010s. The EU suffered a major setback in 2005 when French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed Treaty for Establishing a Constitution for Europe. Even more damaging was the Eurozone crisis, which began in late 2009 and lingers on. Not only has the crisis exposed the fragility of the euro, but it also created intense animosity between Germany and Greece, among other political problems.41 To make matters worse, Britain voted in June 2016 to exit the EU, and xenophobic right-wing parties are growing more powerful across Europe. Indeed, fundamentally illiberal views are commonplace among leaders in Eastern Europe. As a January 2018 article in the New York Times put it: “The Czech president has called Muslim immigrants criminals. The head of Poland's governing party has said refugees are riddled with disease. The leader of Hungary has described migrants as poison … [and] Austria's new far-right interior minister suggested concentrating migrants in asylum centers—with all its obvious and odious echoes of World War II.”42

Finally, a civil war began in 2014 in Eastern Ukraine that involves Russia, which seized Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014, causing a serious deterioration in relations between Russia and the West. Both sides have built up their military forces in Eastern Europe and routinely engage in military exercises that escalate suspicions and tensions between them. This crisis, which largely resulted from EU and NATO expansion, coupled with the West's efforts to promote democracy in countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, and maybe even Russia itself, shows no signs of ending anytime soon.43 Given this state of affairs, Moscow is on the lookout for opportunities to sow discord in the West and weaken the EU and NATO.

Cracks have also opened up in the transatlantic relationship, especially with Trump's arrival in the White House. Trump is contemptuous of almost all the institutions that make up the liberal international order, including the EU and NATO, which he famously described as “obsolete” during the 2016 campaign.44 In a letter sent to European leaders shortly after Trump assumed office, a leading EU policymaker said that the new president posed a serious threat to the EU's future.45 A few months later, just after Trump moved into the White House, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a deeply committed Atlanticist, warned that Europe could not depend on the United States the way it once did. Europeans, she said, “really must take our fate into our own hands.”46 Transatlantic relations have only worsened since then, and the likelihood of a turnaround in the foreseeable future seems remote.

The 2007–08 global financial crisis not only did enormous damage to many peoples’ lives, but it also called into question the competence of the elites who manage the liberal international order.47 In addition to the deterioration in relations between Russia and the West, there are worrying signs of potential conflict with China, which is determined to change the status quo regarding the East China Sea, the South China Sea, Taiwan, and the China-India border. Unsurprisingly, the United States is now more interested in containing rather than engaging China. In fact, the Trump administration recently said that admitting China into the WTO was a mistake, as Beijing's protectionist policies clearly show that it is unwilling to play by that institution's rules.48

Finally, the number of liberal democracies has been declining since 2006, reversing a trend that once looked unstoppable.49 Relatedly, soft authoritarianism appears to have become an attractive alternative to liberal democracy, a development that was almost unthinkable in the early 1990s. And some leaders extol the virtues of illiberal democracy, while others govern countries that are committed to political systems based on deeply held religious beliefs. Of course, liberal democracy has lost some of its appeal in recent years, especially because the United States’ political system often looks dysfunctional. Even serious scholars worry about the future of American democracy.50

In sum, the liberal international order is crumbling.

What Went Wrong?

The early successes of the United States and its allies in building a liberal international order notwithstanding, the order contained the seeds of its own ruin. Even if Western policymakers had been wiser stewards of that order, they could not have extended its longevity in any meaningful way. It was doomed to fail because it contained three fatal flaws.

First, intervening in the politics of countries to turn them into liberal democracies is extremely difficult, and attempting such ambitious social engineering on a global scale is virtually guaranteed to backfire and undermine the legitimacy of the enterprise itself. Nationalism is almost certain to cause significant resistance inside the countries targeted for regime change. Balance of power politics will also help impede the enterprise in particular cases. States that fear regime change—or other forms of U.S. interference—will band together for mutual support and seek ways to thwart the United States’ liberal agenda. Thus, Syria and Iran aided the Iraqi insurgency after the 2003 U.S. invasion, and Russia and China have backed each other economically, militarily, and within international forums such as the UN Security Council.

Second, the liberal international order ultimately creates conditions that lead to serious political problems regarding sovereignty and national identity within the liberal democracies themselves, and all the more so when efforts at regime change fail and produce large-scale refugee flows into liberal countries. Again, the principal cause of the problem is nationalism, which is far from dead even in avowedly liberal societies.

Third, hyperglobalization has produced significant economic costs for large numbers of people inside the liberal democracies, including the sole pole. Those costs, including lost jobs, declining or stagnant wages, and marked income inequality, have serious domestic political consequences, which further undermine the liberal international order. Moreover, the open international economy helped fuel the rise of China, which, along with Russia's revival, eventually undermined unipolarity, an essential condition for creating a liberal international order.

The Perils of Democracy Promotion

The most important requirement for building a liberal international order is to spread liberal democracy far and wide, which was initially seen to be an eminently feasible task. It was widely believed in the West that politics had evolved to the point where there was no sensible alternative to liberal democracy. If so, then it would be relatively easy to create a liberal international order, because spreading liberal democracy around the world would meet little resistance. Indeed, most people would welcome the idea of living in a Western-style democracy, as appeared to be the case in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism.

This endeavor, however, was doomed from the start. To begin, there never has been and never will be universal agreement on what constitutes the ideal political system. One can argue that liberal democracy is the best form of government (I would), but others will invariably favor a different governing system. It is worth remembering that during the 1930s, many people in Europe preferred communism or fascism to liberal democracy. One might then point out that liberal democracy ultimately triumphed over those two “isms.” Although that is true, the history of the 1930s is a reminder that liberal democracy is not the preordained order of things, and it is not unusual for elites and their publics to opt for alternative political systems. Thus, it should not be surprising that illiberal democracies are appearing in Eastern Europe, while China and Russia have embraced authoritarian rule, North Korea is a dictatorship, Iran is an Islamic republic, and Israel increasingly privileges its Jewish identity over its democratic character.51 Nor should it be surprising that there has never been a time when more than 50 percent of the countries in the world were liberal democracies.52

This diversity of opinion about what constitutes the best governing system combines with nationalism to make the process of spreading liberal democracy around the world extremely difficult. Nationalism, after all, is a remarkably powerful political force that places great emphasis on self-determination and sovereignty. Nation-states, in other words, do not want other nation-states telling them how they should order their political system. Thus, trying to impose liberal democracy on a state that prefers an alternative form of government is almost certain to provoke fierce resistance.

FIGHTING LOSING WARS

Trying to build a liberal international order invariably leads to wars against minor powers that aim to turn those targets into liberal democracies. There are significant limits on how much social engineering of this sort great powers can attempt in a bipolar or multipolar system, mainly because they must focus on competing with each other for power and influence. Spreading liberal democracy is of secondary, if not tertiary, importance; indeed, at times liberal states will seek to prop up authoritarian governments if they are aligned against rival great powers, as the United States did repeatedly during the Cold War.

In unipolarity, however, the sole pole is free to go on crusades to make the world more democratic, simply because there are no rival great powers to worry about. Thus, it is unsurprising that the United States has fought seven wars in the years since the Cold War ended and has been at war for two out of every three years over that period.53 Such wars, however, regularly fail to achieve their objective.

The U.S. effort to use military force to bring about democracy has been focused primarily on the Greater Middle East, where it has led to one failure after another.54 U.S. military forces invaded Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) with the intention of turning them into liberal democracies. The occupying forces not only failed to achieve that goal, but they also ended up precipitating bloody wars that did enormous damage to political and social life in those two countries. The main reason for this dismal record is that large-scale social engineering in any society is difficult, but it is especially daunting in a foreign country whose political leadership has just been toppled from power. The target state will be in turmoil; the invading forces will be dealing with an alien culture that might even be hostile to liberal democracy; and most importantly, nationalist sentiment is sure to increase sharply and generate an insurgency against the occupier, as the United States discovered in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Although these failures eroded public support for the liberal international order and cast doubts on the competence of its leaders, they did not stop the sole pole from trying to spread liberal democracy by military means, over-extending itself even further.55 Instead, it looked for less costly ways to accomplish that task, which effectively meant giving up on conquering and occupying non-democracies and employing different strategies to bring down authoritarian leaders. Thus, when fighting broke out among rival factions in Libya in 2011, the United States and its European allies employed airpower to help remove Col. Muammar al-Gaddafi from power. But the Western powers had no way of turning Libya into a functioning state, much less a liberal democracy, with or without troops on the ground.

Also in 2011, the United States and its allies in the Middle East sought to topple President Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria by arming and training rebel groups that opposed him. That effort failed, however, largely because Russia, which has had long-standing strategic ties with Syria, intervened in 2015 to keep Assad in power. Realpolitik thwarted U.S. efforts in Syria. But even if Assad had been deposed, the end result would have been either a continuation of the conflict, as in Libya, or the installation of another ruthless autocrat, as eventually happened in Egypt after President Hosni Mubarak was deposed in early 2011. Liberal democracy in Syria was not a serious possibility, but an abundance of murder and mayhem was.

TURNING THE MAJOR POWERS INTO ENEMIES

Finally, the crusader mentality that underpins the attempts to build a liberal international order leads to the poisoning of relations between the unipole and any major power in the system that is not a liberal democracy. Although the dominant state will be strongly inclined to make war on minor powers to promote liberal democracy, it will rarely ever attack major powers for that purpose, especially if they possess nuclear weapons.56 The costs would be too great, and the likelihood of success would be especially low. Hence, U.S. policymakers in the post–Cold War period have never seriously considered invading China or Russia, even though the United States is far more powerful than either of those countries.

Nevertheless, the United States has been committed to turning China and Russia into liberal democracies and absorbing them into the U.S.-dominated liberal world order. U.S. leaders have not only made their intentions clear, but they have also relied on nongovernmental organizations and various subtle strategies to push Beijing and Moscow toward embracing liberal democracy. In effect, the aim is peaceful regime change. Predictably, China and Russia have resisted the unipole's efforts for the same reason that minor powers have contested U.S. efforts to shape their domestic politics, and indeed for the same reason that Americans now recoil at the idea of Russia interfering in their country's politics. In a world in which nationalism is the most powerful political ideology, self-determination and sovereignty matter hugely for all countries.

China and Russia have also resisted the spread of the liberal order for realist reasons, because it would allow the United States to dominate the international system economically, militarily, and politically. Neither Beijing nor Moscow, for example, wants U.S. military forces in its neighborhood, much less on its borders. Thus, it is hardly surprising that China talks about pushing the U.S. military out of the Western Pacific and that Russia has long been deeply opposed to EU and NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. Indeed, moving those institutions toward Russia eventually led to the Ukraine crisis in 2014. That ongoing conflict has not only poisoned relations between Russia and the West, but it has incentivized Moscow to find ways to weaken both the EU and NATO. In short, both nationalist and realist calculations caused the two major powers in unipolarity to contest the unipole's efforts to build a robust liberal international order.

Turning the Liberal Democracies against the Liberal Order

Building a robust liberal international order eventually causes serious political troubles inside the liberal democracies themselves, because the accompanying policies clash with nationalism. Those problems on the home front, which come in two forms, work to eventually undermine the order itself.

To begin with, liberal states believe strongly in the virtues of international institutions, which leads them to delegate more and more authority to the institutions that make up the order. That strategy, however, is widely seen as evidence that those states are surrendering sovereignty. One can argue about whether those liberal countries are actually giving up sovereignty, but there is no question that they are delegating the authority to make some important decisions to those institutions, which is likely to cause serious political trouble in a modern nation-state.57 After all, nationalism privileges self-determination and sovereignty, and thus it is fundamentally at odds with international institutions that make policies that decidedly affect their member states.58 “The cumulative effect of such expansions of international authority,” Jeff Colgan and Robert Keohane write, “is to excessively limit sovereignty and give people the sense that foreign forces are controlling their lives.”59

The intensity of this problem will depend on how much power and influence the relevant institutions wield over their member states. Of course, the institutions that make up a liberal world order are designed to have a profound effect on the behavior of their member states. This institutional influence inevitably raises concerns about a “democratic deficit.” Voters in those countries come to think that the distant bureaucrats who make decisions that matter greatly for them are inaccessible and unaccountable.

There is clear evidence of this phenomenon at play across Europe.60 Consider the 2016 vote in favor of Brexit. Given the huge impact the EU has on its members’ policies, it is unsurprising that one of the principal reasons a majority of British citizens voted for Brexit is because they thought that their country had surrendered too much authority to Brussels and that it was time to reassert British sovereignty. In particular, many Britons believed that Britain had lost control of its economic policy, which was undermining democratic accountability.61 EU bureaucrats in Brussels, who were not elected by Britons, were seen to be the key architects of British economic policy and other policies as well. Thus, the authors of an important study on Brexit write: “Regaining sovereignty—taking back control—was a major theme in the 2016 referendum.”62

Fears in the West about surrendering sovereignty were not limited to the EU. As Robert Kuttner points out, with the blossoming of hyperglobalization in the 1990s, the IMF and the World Bank “mutated into the opposite of the roles imagined at Bretton Woods. They became instruments for the enforcement of classical laissez-faire as a universal governing principle.”63 Unsurprisingly, concerns about sovereignty have played an important role in recent U.S. politics. In particular, Trump ran for president on a platform that emphasized “America First,” and he harshly criticized all the key institutions that make up the liberal international order, including the EU, the IMF, and the World Bank.64

The liberal international order also adopts policies that clash with national identity, which matters greatly to people all around the world, including those in the United States and Western Europe.65 At its core, liberalism is an individualistic ideology that places great weight on the concept of inalienable rights. This belief, which says that every individual on Earth has the same set of basic rights, is what underpins the universalistic dimension of liberalism. This universalistic or transnational perspective stands in marked contrast to the profound particularism of nationalism, which is built on the belief that the world is divided into discrete nations, each with its own culture. Preserving that culture is best served by having one's own state, so that the nation can survive in the face of threats from the “other.”66

Given liberalism's emphasis on individuals with equal rights, coupled with its tendency to downplay if not ignore national identity, it is unsurprising that the liberal international order emphasizes that countries should axiomatically accept refugees seeking shelter and that individuals should encounter few obstacles to moving from one nation-state to another for economic or other reasons. The paradigmatic example of this policy is the EU's Schengen Agreement, which has largely eliminated borders among most of that institution's member states. Furthermore, the EU is deeply committed in principle to opening its doors to refugees fleeing trouble spots.

In a world where national identity matters greatly, mixing different peoples together, which is what happens when there are open borders and broad-minded refugee policies, is usually a prescription for serious trouble. It seems clear, for example, that immigration was the main reason British voters supported Brexit. They were especially unhappy that people from Eastern Europe used the EU's policy of open borders to migrate easily to Britain.67 Britain is hardly an exception in this regard, as anti-immigrant sentiment is widespread in Europe and fuels hostility toward the EU.68 The large numbers of refugees from the Greater Middle East that began arriving in Europe in 2015 have certainly not been accorded the kind of welcome one would expect from states that are at the center of the liberal international order. Indeed, there has been enormous resistance to accepting those refugees, especially in Eastern Europe, but also in Germany, where Chancellor Merkel hurt herself politically by initially welcoming them. This trouble over open borders and refugees has not only called into question the EU's commitment to liberal values, but it has also created rifts among the member states—rifts that have shaken the foundation of that venerable institution.

The Downside of Hyperglobalization

The sharp growth in economic intercourse that has come with the establishment of the liberal international order has helped cause significant economic problems inside the liberal states in the system. These problems, in turn, have generated substantial political resistance to that order. When that happens in a democracy, the public is likely to turn on the liberal elites and elect leaders who support policies that are at odds with liberal principles.

The contemporary international economy is highly integrated and remarkably dynamic. Change occurs at warp speed, and major developments in one country invariably have significant effects in other countries. This wide-open system has had considerable benefits. It has led to impressive growth at the global level, helped lift many millions of people out of poverty in countries such as China and India, and provided huge economic benefits for the world's wealthiest people. At the same time, it has caused major problems that governments are ill equipped to fix, at least if they play according to the rules of the liberal world order. The best way to understand this phenomenon is to compare today's hyperglobalization with the moderate globalization that obtained under the Bretton Woods consensus from 1945 until the late 1980s.69

The Bretton Woods consensus was designed to facilitate an open international economy, but only up to a point.70 There were, for example, significant limits on capital flows across state boundaries. And although GATT was designed to expedite international trade, governments had considerable maneuver room to adopt protectionist policies when it was in their interest to do so. In effect, governments were able to pursue policies that not only facilitated prosperity, but also protected their citizens from the vagaries of the market. John Ruggie famously refers to this relationship between markets and governments as “embedded liberalism.”71 The Bretton Woods consensus worked well for more than four decades, although its days were numbered by the late 1980s.

Hyperglobalization, which began gaining traction in the 1980s and accelerated after the Cold War, effectively overturned the Bretton Woods consensus. The new order, created largely by Western policymakers, was designed to greatly reduce regulation of global markets by removing controls on capital flows and replacing GATT with the WTO. This new trade organization, which began operating in 1995, was intended to open up markets all over the world and make it especially difficult for governments to pursue protectionist policies. “Any obstacle to free trade,” as Dani Rodrik notes, was seen “as an abomination to be removed; caveats be damned.”72 In essence, almost any kind of government interference in the workings of the world economy was considered harmful to the liberal international order. To quote Rodrik again, “The state went from being the handmaiden of economic growth to the principal obstacle blocking it.”73

HYPERGLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Hyperglobalization has caused a number of major economic problems that have worked to undermine the legitimacy of the liberal world order in the states that form the core of that system. For starters, many jobs in particular sectors of a country's economy disappear quickly as a result of outsourcing, throwing large numbers of people out of work.74 Sometimes entire regions see their traditional economic base destroyed. It is often difficult for the unemployed, many of whom are unskilled workers with little mobility, to find well-paying jobs, or any job at all.75 And even if they find good jobs, there is always the possibility they will lose them again, given the “creative destruction” that comes with hyperglobalization. Even people who have not lost their jobs worry that someday they might. In brief, the dynamism inherent in the world economy not only threatens jobs, but also fosters an acute sense of uncertainty about the future among people everywhere.

In addition, hyperglobalization has done little to raise the real income levels of the lower and middle classes in the liberal West. At the same time, it has greatly increased the wages and the wealth of the upper classes.76 The result is staggering economic inequality almost everywhere, which shows few signs of abating.77 Indeed, the problem appears likely to be getting worse.78 Under the Bretton Woods consensus, governments were in a good position to deal with problems of this sort by devising redistributive tax policies, training programs for workers, and generous welfare benefits. But in the liberal international order, the solution to almost every problem is to let the market deal with it, not governments, which are considered to be more of a liability than an asset for making the global economy work smoothly. To the extent that rules are needed to facilitate the smooth working of the global economy, better to rely on international institutions than governments.

Markets, of course, cannot fix these problems; indeed, they helped cause them in the first place and are likely to make them worse in the absence of policies that states design to protect their citizenry. As one would expect, these festering problems have led to widespread dissatisfaction with the liberal international order and growing sentiment for governments to adopt protectionist economic policies, which would undermine the present system. Trump capitalized on this hostility toward the existing order in the 2016 presidential campaign not only by railing against international institutions, but also by making the case for pursuing protectionist economic policies. He emphasized the importance of protecting U.S. workers above all else. In both the Republican primaries and the general election, he defeated opponents who defended the liberal international order and argued against protectionism.79 Since becoming president, Trump has moved in a decidedly protectionist direction. Ultimately, when markets clash with the deep-seated interests of large numbers of a country's citizens, its politics will evolve in ways that undermine the liberal international order.

There is another major problem that comes with hyperglobalization. The ease and speed with which capital flows across borders, coupled with the emphasis that the liberal world order places on government deregulation, make this order prone to large-scale economic crises in particular countries or regions, or even the entire world. “Periods of high international capital mobility,” Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff write, “have repeatedly produced international banking crises.”80 In fact, there have been a number of crises since hyperglobalization began taking root in the late 1980s.81 The most consequential were the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, which came dangerously close to spreading across the entire globe, and the 2007–08 global financial crisis, which was the most severe economic breakdown since the Great Depression of the 1930s and did much to delegitimize the liberal international order in the West.82 Given the continuing mobility of capital, more crises of this sort will likely occur, further weakening the present order and perhaps even bringing it crashing down.

A few words are in order regarding the euro, which is a key feature of the liberal international order, even though it is part of a strictly European institution.83 When that currency was established in 1999, it represented a giant step forward in promoting monetary union among the member states, although there was neither fiscal nor political union to help underpin the euro. Critics at the time predicted that without fiscal and political union, the euro would eventually be plagued by significant problems.84 Many advocates recognized the problem, but thought that monetary union would ultimately lead to union on all three fronts, thus eliminating the problem. But that did not happen, and the euro encountered its first major crisis in 2009, which produced not just economic problems, but political problems as well. The crisis and the ensuing attempts to solve it brought hard-edged nationalist sentiment to the surface in Europe.

The EU had great difficulty dealing with the eurozone crisis, but the problems were eventually solved by massive bailouts from institutions such as the European Central Bank and from the U.S. government, although not before significant political damage was done to the EU. More importantly, however, the EU has not made significant movement toward fiscal and political union, which means that the fix is temporary and that more crises are likely in the years ahead, which will further undermine not only the EU, but the liberal international order more generally.

THE RISE OF CHINA

There is an additional problem linked to hyperglobalization that has little to do with the growing political opposition to the international order in liberal countries, and everything to do with the global balance of power. Until Trump came to power in 2017, Western elites, in keeping with their post–Cold War policy of engaging, not containing, China, were deeply committed to integrating China into the world economy, including all of its key economic institutions. An increasingly prosperous and wealthy China, they assumed, would eventually become a liberal democracy and an upstanding member of the liberal international order.

What the architects of that policy did not realize, however, is that by helping accelerate Chinese growth, they were actually helping undermine the liberal order, as China has rapidly grown into an economic powerhouse with significant military capability. In effect, they have helped China become a great power, thus undercutting unipolarity, which is essential for maintaining a liberal world order. This problem has been compounded by the resurgence of Russia, which is once again a great power, although clearly a weak one. With the rise of China and Russia's comeback, the international system has become multipolar, which is a death knell for the liberal international order. To make matters worse, neither China nor Russia has become a liberal democracy.

Even if China and Russia had not become great powers and the world remained unipolar, the liberal order would still be falling apart today because of its intrinsic flaws. The election of Donald Trump, who sharply and frequently criticized all the key elements of the post–Cold War order during his presidential campaign, is evidence of how much trouble it was in by 2016. Thus, if the international system had remained unipolar, the liberal world order would have devolved into an agnostic order under President Trump, as realist orders have no place in unipolarity. There is certainly no evidence that he is committed to refashioning the existing liberal order. Indeed, he appears bent on wrecking it. With or without China, the liberal international order was destined to fail, because it was fatally flawed at birth.

SUMMARY

The various causal processes described above have all played an important role in subverting the liberal international order. Although each one has a distinct logic, they have often operated synergistically. For example, the negative effects of hyperglobalization on the lower and middle classes have combined with the nationalist resentment over immigration and the sense of lost sovereignty to fuel a strong populist backlash against the principles and practices of the liberal order. Indeed, that anger has often been directed at the liberal elites who have benefited from the order and who vigorously defend it. That resentment, of course, has had significant political consequences. It has caused deep political divisions in the United States and other Western democracies, led to Brexit, helped put Trump in the White House, and fueled support for nationalist leaders around the world.

Where Are We Headed?

One might acknowledge that the liberal international order is in terminal decline, but argue that it can be replaced with a more pragmatic version, one that avoids the excesses of the post–Cold War order.85 This more modest liberal order would pursue a more nuanced, less aggressive approach to spreading liberal democracy, rein in hyperglobalization, and put some significant limits on the power of international institutions. The new order, according to this perspective, would look something like the Western order during the Cold War, although it would be global and liberal, not bounded and realist.

This solution is not feasible, however, because the unipolar moment is over, which means there is no chance of maintaining any kind of liberal international order for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, President Trump has no intention of pursuing a "liberal-lite" world order, and without his support, that option is a nonstarter. But even if Trump were not an obstacle and the international system were to remain unipolar, the United States would fail if it lowered its sights and attempted to construct a less ambitious liberal order. Indeed, it would end up building an agnostic international order instead.

It is impossible to build a meaningful liberal global order with modest or more passive policies. The enterprise requires too much social engineering in too many places. If it has any chance of succeeding (I think it has none), the liberal unipole and its allies must relentlessly pursue highly ambitious global policies, which is why the United States and its liberal partners acted the way they did in the wake of the Cold War. That approach, however, is now politically infeasible because of past failures. Consequently, the liberal democracies have no choice but to take small steps here and there to remake the world in their own image, while adopting a live and let live approach toward most countries in the world. That humble approach would effectively produce an agnostic order. But that is not going to happen, because the system is multipolar and great power politics are once again at play. Thus, the key question is: What kinds of realist orders will dominate the landscape in the new multipolar world?

THE NEW REALIST ORDERS

There are likely to be three different realist orders in the foreseeable future: a thin international order and two thick bounded orders—one led by China, the other by the United States. The emerging thin international order will be concerned mainly with overseeing arms control agreements and making the global economy work efficiently. It is also likely to pay more serious attention than in the past to problems relating to climate change. In essence, the institutions that make up the international order will focus on facilitating interstate cooperation. The two bounded orders, in contrast, will be concerned principally with waging security competition against each other, although that will call for promoting cooperation among the members of each order. There will be significant economic and military competition between those two orders that will need to be managed, which is why they will be thick orders.

Two key features of the new multipolar world will profoundly shape the emerging orders. First, assuming that China continues its impressive rise, it will be involved in an intense security competition with the United States that will be the central feature of international politics over the course of the twenty-first century. That rivalry will lead to the creation of bounded orders dominated by China and the United States. Military alliances will be core components of those two orders, which are now beginning to form and will resemble the Soviet-led and U.S.-led orders in the Cold War.

Beijing and Washington, however, will sometimes have reasons to cooperate on select military issues, an endeavor that will fall within the purview of the international order, as it did during the Cold War. Again, the focus will be principally on arms control agreements and will involve Russia as well as China and the United States. The existing treaties and agreements dealing with proliferation are likely to remain in place, because all three great powers will want to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. But Beijing, Moscow, and Washington will have to negotiate new treaties limiting their arsenals, as the superpowers did during the Cold War.86 Nevertheless, the U.S.-led and Chinese-led bounded orders will be largely responsible for dealing with core security matters.

In military matters, the three emerging orders built around the U.S.-China rivalry should bear a marked resemblance to the three Cold War orders, albeit with China taking the place of the Soviet Union.

No such parallels exist in the economic realm, however. There was little economic intercourse between the superpowers or their respective orders for most of the Cold War. Thus, the existing international order was not concerned in any meaningful way with facilitating economic relations between the two sides. Economic dealings were largely confined to the bounded orders, and there the main objective was to pursue policies that would help gain advantage over the other side. Because economic power underpins military power, waging security competition was carried out in both the economic and military domains.

ECONOMIC COOPERATION AND RIVALRY

The situation on the economic front is much different today than it was in the Cold War, which leads to the second important feature of the new multipolarity that will shape the incipient orders. There is a huge amount of economic intercourse between China and the United States, and between China and U.S. allies in East Asia. China and the United States also trade and invest all over the world. The security competition between the two bounded orders is unlikely to markedly reduce those economic flows.87 The gains from continued trade are too great. Even if the United States tries to limit its trade with China, Beijing can compensate by increasing its trade with other partners, such as Europe. The future, in other words, is likely to resemble the situation in Europe before World War I, where there was an intense security competition between the Triple Alliance (Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy) and the Triple Entente (Great Britain, France, and Russia), yet an enormous amount of economic interaction among those six countries and within Europe more generally.

Because the world economy will remain highly interdependent, the emerging international order will play a pivotal role in managing economic relations among countries across the globe. Although China has a deep-seated interest in helping the order facilitate economic cooperation, it will wield its increasing power to reshape the new international order to its advantage. It will seek to rewrite the rules in the order's current economic institutions to give it more influence, and it will create new institutions that reflect its growing power.88 One prominent example of the latter approach is Beijing's establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2015, which some observers see as a potential rival to the IMF and the World Bank. Of course, this situation is fundamentally different from how the Soviet Union behaved during the Cold War.

That is not the end of the economic story, however, as there is sure to be an intense economic rivalry between the two bounded orders that takes place within the broader context of continued economic cooperation at the global level.89 This competition will be driven in good part by security concerns. Economic might, after all, is the foundation of military might, which means that China has a powerful strategic incentive to possess the dominant economy in the world, which is its goal. “Made in China 2025,” for example, is Beijing's plan to dominate global markets in a wide range of high-tech products. China's strategy is to give large government subsidies to state-owned companies and supplement their research with technology stolen from American and other Western companies.”90 China is also using its growing economic power to coerce its neighbors in East Asia to side with Beijing over Washington.91

The United States, of course, will fight back against China, not just for security-related reasons, but also because the U.S. business community does not want to lose out to China.92 The Trump administration's harsh economic policies toward China are just the start of what promises to be a long-running and intense rivalry between the U.S.-led and Chinese-led orders.93 The United States, for example, is sure to try to limit the transfer to China of dual-use technologies—sophisticated civilian technologies that can be used for military purposes. It will also try to manage its trade and investment with China, as well as that of its own allies, in ways that do not erode their position in the balance of power and hopefully improve it.

The two bounded orders, which are beginning to form, will include institutions that aim to foster economic cooperation among their members, while seeking to gain economic advantage over the rival order. The Obama administration, for example, explicitly designed the Trans-Pacific Partnership for this purpose, although Trump withdrew from it after he became president. China's highly ambitious “One Belt, One Road” initiative, which was launched in 2013, is designed not just to help China sustain its impressive economic growth, but also to project Chinese military and political power around the globe. And because the United States refused to join the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank, that impressive institution is likely to become a central part of the China-led bounded order.

In short, the rivalry between the China-led and U.S.-led bounded orders will involve both full-throated economic and military competition, as was the case with the bounded orders dominated by Moscow and Washington during the Cold War.94 The big difference this time is that the international order will be deeply involved in managing the cooperative aspects of the global economy, which was not the case during the Cold War.95

RUSSIA AND EUROPE

What about Russia? It is certainly a great power, which is why the emerging world is multipolar, not bipolar. But it will be by far the weakest of the three great powers for the foreseeable future, unless either the U.S. or Chinese economy encounters major long-term problems. The key question regarding Russia is: Which side, if any, will it take in the U.S.-China rivalry? Although Russia is now aligned with China, it is likely to switch sides over time and ally with the United States, simply because an increasingly powerful China is the greater threat to Russia, given their geographical proximity. Should Moscow and Washington forge closer relations because of their mutual fear of China, Russia will be loosely integrated into the U.S.-led bounded order. Should Moscow continue to have friendly relations with Beijing because it fears the United States more than it does China, Russia will be loosely integrated into the China-led bounded order. It is possible that Russia will try not to align itself with either side and remain on the sidelines.96

Finally, what about Europe? Most of the countries in Europe, especially the major powers, are likely to become part of the U.S.-led bounded order, although they are unlikely to play a serious military role in containing China. They do not have the capability to project substantial military power into East Asia, and they have little reason to acquire it, because China does not directly threaten Europe, and because it makes more sense for Europe to pass the buck to the United States and its Asian allies. U.S. policymakers, however, will want the Europeans inside their bounded order for strategically related economic reasons. In particular, the United States will want to keep European countries from selling dual-use technologies to China and to help put economic pressure on Beijing when necessary. In return, U.S. military forces will remain in Europe, keeping NATO alive and continuing to serve as the pacifier in that region. Given that virtually every European leader would like to see that happen, the threat of leaving should give the United States significant leverage in getting the Europeans to cooperate on the economic front against China.

Conclusion

The United States and its allies built a formidable order during the Cold War, but it was neither international nor liberal. It was a bounded order whose principal purpose was to wage security competition with a rival bounded order dominated by the Soviet Union. Both orders were realist at their core, not liberal or communist. The coming of unipolarity in the wake of the Cold War allowed the victorious West—with the United States taking the lead—to begin building a truly liberal international order. The hope was that it would act as a handmaiden for a peaceful and prosperous world.

During the 1990s and the first few years of the new century, it looked like the liberal order was going to work as intended and would have a long life. Advocates and architects could point to many successes, while acknowledging some failures. But starting around 2005, the order began to encounter serious problems, which have multiplied with time, to the point where it has begun to collapse. This outcome should have been foreseen, as the order had within it the seeds of its own destruction and thus was destined to fail sooner rather than later.

The attempt by the United States and its allies to create a liberal international order faced three main problems. First, it required the liberal states in the system, especially the United States, to pursue a highly revisionist and wildly ambitious policy of regime change that was almost certain to fail in an era in which nationalism, with its emphasis on sovereignty and self-determination, remains a remarkably powerful force. The policy was also stymied by balance of power politics at both the global and regional levels.

Second, by pushing for the free movement of people across borders and the delegation of substantial decisionmaking authority to international institutions, the expanding liberal order caused significant political problems inside the liberal states themselves. The results often clashed with beliefs about national identity and sovereignty, which matter greatly to most citizens in modern nation-states.

Third, although some people and countries benefited from hyperglobalization, it ultimately caused major economic and political problems inside the liberal democracies, which eventually led to a serious erosion of support for the liberal international order. At the same time, the economic dynamism that comes with hyperglobalization helped China rapidly turn itself into a great power at roughly the same time Russia was reestablishing itself as a great power. That shift in the global balance of power put an end to unipolarity, which is a prerequisite for a liberal world order.

In the emerging multipolar world, there is likely to be a realist international order that will be concerned with managing the world economy and also fostering and maintaining arms control agreements. The emphasis in that order will be on facilitating interstate cooperation. In addition, there are likely to be Chinese-led and U.S.-led bounded orders that will help prosecute the security competition that is almost certain to arise between China and its allies, on the one hand, and the United States and its allies, on the other. That rivalry will have both economic and military dimensions.

How should the United States act as it leaves behind the liberal international order that it worked so assiduously to build? First, it should resist any temptation to continue trying to forcefully spread democracy across the planet via regime change. Because the United States will be compelled to engage in balance of power politics with China and Russia, its ability to engage in social engineering abroad will be sharply limited. The temptation to remake the world will always be there, however, because the United States believes so fervently in the virtues of liberal democracy. But it should resist that temptation, because going on liberal crusades is certain to lead to serious trouble.

Second, the United States should seek to maximize its influence in the economic institutions that will make up the emerging international order. Doing so is important for maintaining as favorable a position as possible in the evolving global distribution of power. After all, economic power is the basis of military power. It is imperative that Washington not allow China to dominate those institutions and use the resulting influence to gain power at the United States’ expense.

Third, U.S. policymakers should ensure that they create a formidable bounded order that can contain Chinese expansion. That task mandates creating economic institutions such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and a military alliance in Asia that is similar to NATO during the Cold War. In the process, the United States should go to great lengths to pull Russia out of China's orbit and integrate it into the U.S.-led order.

In sum, the time has come for the U.S. foreign policy establishment to recognize that the liberal international order was a failed enterprise with no future. The orders that will matter for the foreseeable future are realist orders that must be fashioned to serve the United States’ interests.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Olafur Bjornsson, Joshua Byun, Michael Desch, Charles Glaser, Nicolas Guilhot, Jack Jacobsen, Robert Keohane, Do Young Lee, Jennifer A. Lind, Nuno Monteiro, Paul Poast, Barry Posen, Burak Tan, an anonymous reviewer, and especially Eliza Gheorghe, Mariya Grinberg, Sebastian Rosato, and Stephen Walt for their incisive comments. He also thanks the many individuals who offered insightful comments when he presented earlier versions of this article at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, the Notre Dame International Security Center, and the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago.

Notes

1. 

Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, The Empty Throne: America's Abdication of Global Leadership (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018).

2. 

This article assumes that the world became multipolar in or close to 2016, and that the shift away from unipolarity is a death sentence for the liberal international order, which is in the process of collapsing and will be replaced by realist orders.

3. 

My definition of an international order is consistent with how other scholars define the term. See Hal Brands, American Grand Strategy and the Liberal Order: Continuity, Change, and Options for the Future (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2016), p. 2; G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 23, 45; and Michael J. Mazarr, Summary of the Building a Sustainable International Order Project (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2018), pp. 3–5. Order does not mean peace or stability. In other words, it is not the opposite of disorder, a term that can convey chaos and conflict. Nevertheless, many in the West believe that a well-established liberal world order facilitates peace. Nor is order a concept that describes the balance of power in a particular region or among the great powers. The international order and the global balance of power are distinct entities, although they are related, as discussed below.

4. 

For my views on international institutions, see John J. Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Winter 1994/95), pp. 5–49, doi.org/10.2307/2539078.

5. 

President George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address” (Washington, D.C.: White House, January 29, 2002), https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html.

6. 

Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Stephen D. Krasner, ed., “International Regimes,” special issue, International Organization, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Spring 1982).

7. 

Jack Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

8. 

Statement of Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., U.S. Navy Commander, U.S. Pacific Command before the House Armed Services Committee on U.S. Pacific Command Posture, 115th Cong., 1st sess., April 26, 2017, p. 1, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AS/AS00/20170426/105870/HHRG-115-AS00-Wstate-HarrisH-20170426.PDF.

9. 

Consider, for example, the hard-nosed security competition between Britain and the United States in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the intense rivalry among Britain, France, and Germany in the twenty-five years before World War I. All of those countries were liberal democracies. See Christopher Layne, “Kant or Cant: The Myth of the Democratic Peace,” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Fall 1994), pp. 5–49, doi.org/10.2307/2539195; and Ido Oren, “The Subjectivity of the ‘Democratic’ Peace: Changing U.S. Perceptions of Imperial Germany,” International Security, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall 1995), pp. 147–184, doi.org/10.2307/2539232.

10. 

See John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018).

11. 

John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. 30.

12. 

In using the word “agnostic” to describe this kind of order, I am not saying that the unipole cares little about its own ideology or does not have one. In fact, it may be seriously committed to a particular ideology at home, but it will be largely noncommittal—agnostic—about the ideology that other states adopt.

13. 

See Zheng Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); and Suisheng Zhao, “Foreign Policy Implications of Chinese Nationalism Revisited: The Strident Turn,” Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 22, No. 82 (July 2013), pp. 535–553, doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2013.766379.

14. 

Timothy R. Heath, China's New Governing Party Paradigm (New York: Ashgate, 2014); and David Shambaugh, China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

15. 

Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987).

16. 

In fact, the United States established the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) in the early Cold War to limit East-West trade. Michael Mastanduno, Economic Containment: CoCom and the Politics of East-West Trade (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).

17. 

Laurien Crump and Simon Godard, “Reassessing Communist International Organizations: A Comparative Analysis of COMECON and the Warsaw Pact in Relation to Their Cold War Competitors,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 27, No. 1 (February 2018), pp. 85–109, doi.org/10.1017/S0960777317000455.

18. 

Joanne Gowa, Allies, Adversaries, and International Trade (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 3.

19. 

Pascaline Winand, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the United States of Europe (New York: St. Martin's, 1993), pp. 109–137. The United States cared greatly about relative gains in its dealings with the Soviet Union, as relative gains and losses are largely synonymous with shifts in the balance of power. But Washington paid little attention to relative gains when dealing with its West European allies and focused instead on maximizing their absolute gains, not because U.S. policymakers were motivated by liberal thinking, but because the more powerful U.S. allies were, the better suited they were to help contain the Soviet Union.

20. 

Melvyn P. Leffler, “The United States and the Strategic Dimensions of the Marshall Plan,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer 1988), pp. 277–306, doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.1988.tb00477.x; and Sebastian Rosato, Europe United: Power Politics and the Making of the European Community (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011).

21. 

Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 70, No. 1 (1990/91), pp. 23–33, doi.org/10.2307/20044692.

22. 

Bush first laid out his vision before a joint session of Congress on September 11, 1990. President George H.W. Bush, “Address before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Persian Gulf Crisis and the Federal Budget Deficit,” September 11, 1990, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/archives/public-papers/2217.

23. 

Ibid.

24. 

Albright made this statement on NBC's The Today Show. Madeleine K. Albright, interview by Matt Lauer, Today Show, February 19, 1998. For Obama's use, see Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the United States Military Academy Commencement Ceremony” (Washington, D.C.: White House, May 28, 2014).

25. 

The one important similarity between the new liberal international order and the bounded realist Western order is that both represent thick orders.

26. 

See David C. Hendrickson, “The Recovery of Internationalism,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 5 (September/October 1994), pp. 26–27, doi.org/10.2307/20046829.

27. 

Europe's enthusiasm for this mission is reflected in the policies of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). See Pamela Jawad, “Conflict Resolution through Democracy Promotion? The Role of the OSCE in Georgia,” Democratization, Vol. 15, No. 3 (June 2008), pp. 611–629, doi.org/10.1080/13510340801972288.

28. 

Enlarging NATO was actually the core element in a broader strategy that also included expanding the European Union and promoting the so-called color revolutions in Eastern Europe to spread democracy. See John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 93, No. 5 (September/October 2014), pp. 77–89, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24483306.

29. 

Some analysts made this argument after the Ukraine crisis broke out in February 2014. For example, Stephen Sestanovich claims that “today's aggressive Russian policy was in place” in the early 1990s and that “power calculations undergirded” U.S. policy toward Russia—to include NATO expansion—from that point forward. See Sestanovich's response, “How the West Has Won,” in Michael McFaul, Stephen Sestanovich, and John J. Mearsheimer, “Faulty Powers: Who Started the Ukraine Crisis?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 93, No. 6 (November/December 2014), pp. 171, 173, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24483933. NATO enlargement, from this perspective, is a realist policy. The available evidence, however, contradicts this interpretation of events. Russia was in no position to take the offensive in the 1990s, and although its economy and military improved somewhat after 2000, hardly anyone in the West saw it as a serious threat to invade its neighbors—including Ukraine—before the February 2014 crisis. In fact, Russia had few large-scale combat units on or near its western border, and no serious Russian policymaker or pundit talked about conquering territory in Eastern Europe. Thus, it is unsurprising that U.S. leaders rarely invoked the threat of Russian aggression to justify NATO expansion.

30. 

Ikenberry, After Victory, pp. 235–239, 245–246, 270–273.

31. 

Strobe Talbott, “Why NATO Should Grow,” New York Review of Books, August 10, 1995, pp. 27–28. Talbott's views on NATO expansion were widely shared in the upper echelons of the Clinton administration. See Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher, “Reinforcing NATO's Strength in the West and Deepening Cooperation with the East,” opening statement at the North Atlantic Council Ministerial Meeting, Noordwijk, the Netherlands, May 30, 1995; Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, “A Presidential Tribute to Gerald Ford,” Ford Museum Auditorium, Grand Rapids, Michigan, April 17, 1997; and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, “Commencement Address,” Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 5, 1997.

32. 

Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, “American Principle and Purpose in East Asia,” 1997 Forrestal Lecture, U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, April 15, 1997. See also Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher, “America and the Asia-Pacific Future,” address to the Asia Society, New York City, May 27, 1994; White House, “A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement” (Washington, D.C.: White House, February 1995), pp. 28–29, http://nssarchive.us/NSSR/1995.pdf; and White House, “A National Security Strategy for a New Century” (Washington, D.C.: White House, October 1998), pp. 41–47, http://nssarchive.us/NSSR/1998.pdf. Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick first introduced the term “responsible stakeholder” in 2005. Zoellick, “Whither China? From Membership to Responsibility,” remarks to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, New York City, September 21, 2005.

33. 

President Bush said shortly before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 that “the greatest danger in the war on terror [is] outlaw regimes arming with weapons of mass destruction.” American Enterprise Institute (AEI), “President George W. Bush Speaks at AEI's Annual Dinner,” February 28, 2003, http://www.aei.org/publication/president-george-w-bush-speaks-at-aeis-annual-dinner. On the Bush Doctrine, see White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, D.C.: White House, September 17, 2002), https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/63562.pdf.

34. 

One might think that NATO expansion, U.S. efforts to turn China into a liberal democracy, and the Bush Doctrine are all evidence of untethered realism that unipolarity made possible. This conclusion would be wrong, however. It is clear from the discourse in policymaking circles and within the foreign policy establishment that these policies were motivated by liberal theories and that the United States and its allies in the West were firmly committed to building a liberal international order that would transcend balance of power politics. Almost all realists, it is worth noting, opposed NATO expansion, the Iraq War, and the Bush Doctrine. Moreover, they favored emphasizing containment over engagement in dealing with China. If the United States had been guided by realist logic in the aftermath of the Cold War, it would have sought to create an agnostic international order and pursued the policies advocated by realist thinkers. See Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), pp. 266–269.

35. 

AEI, “President George W. Bush Speaks at AEI's Annual Dinner.”

36. 

Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest, No. 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3–18, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184.

37. 

Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion, pp. 120–151; and Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions, pp. 21–52.

38. 

Arch Puddington and Tyler Roylance, “Populists and Autocrats: The Dual Threat to Global Democracy,” in Freedom House, “Freedom in the World, 2017” (Washington, D.C.: Freedom House, 2017), p. 4.

39. 

Kathryn Sikkink, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011). See also Sarah B. Snyder, From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

40. 

Rory McCarthy, “Barak: Make Peace with Palestinians or Face Apartheid,” Guardian, February 2, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/03/barak-apartheid-palestine-peace; and Rory McCarthy, “Israel Risks Apartheid-Like Struggle If Two-State Solution Fails, Says Olmert,” Guardian, November 30, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/nov/30/israel.

41. 

Claudia Sternberg, Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni, and Kalypso Nicolaidis, The Greco-German Affair in the Euro Crisis: Mutual Recognition Lost? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

42. 

Patrick Kingsley, “Trump's Immigration Remarks Outrage Many, but Others Quietly Agree,” New York Times, January 12, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/world/europe/trump-immigration-outrage.html.

43. 

Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault”; and my reply in McFaul, Sestanovich, and Mearsheimer, “Faulty Powers,” pp. 175–178.

44. 

Ashley Parker, “Donald Trump Says NATO Is ‘Obsolete,’ UN Is ‘Political Game',” New York Times, April 2, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/04/02/donald-trump-tells-crowd-hed-be-fine-if-nato-broke-up/.

45. 

James Kanter, “Trump Threatens Europe's Stability, a Top Leader Warns,” New York Times, January 31, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/world/europe/trump-european-union-donald-tusk.html.

46. 

Henry Farrell, “Thanks to Trump, Germany Says It Can't Rely on the United States. What Does That Mean?” Monkey Cage blog, Washington Post, May 28, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/05/28/thanks-to-trump-germany-says-it-cant-rely-on-america-what-does-that-mean.

47. 

John Lanchester, “After the Fall,” London Review of Books, July 5, 2018, pp. 3–8; and Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018).

48. 

Shawn Donnan, “U.S. Says China WTO Membership Was a Mistake,” Financial Times, January 19, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/edb346ec-fd3a-11e7-9b32-d7d59aace167.

49. 

Puddington and Roylance, “Populists and Autocrats,” p. 4.

50. 

William A. Galston, Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018); Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018); and Cass R. Sunstein, ed., Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America (New York: Dey Street, 2018).

51. 

Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, and Christopher Walker, eds., Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Challenge to Democracy (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016); and “Jewish or Democratic?” Economist, July 28, 2018, p. 30.

52. 

Puddington and Roylance, “Populists and Autocrats,” p. 4.

53. 

John Ikenberry maintains that for the United States to sustain a liberal international order, it must pursue a restrained foreign policy. “The more that power peeks out from behind these institutions,” he writes, “the more that power will provoke reaction and resistance.” Ikenberry believes that this is not a problem for the United States, however, because it has a “unique ability to engage in strategic restraint.” Ikenberry, After Victory, pp. 270–271. But he is wrong; liberal hegemons such as the United States are highly aggressive and adopt especially ambitious agendas, because that is what is required to create a liberal international order.

54. 

Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion, pp. 120–187.

55. 

The persistence of these efforts despite repeated failures is emphasized by Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions, pp. 137–216.

56. 

Building on Nuno P. Monteiro's work, I distinguish among the sole great power, major powers, and minor powers. Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

57. 

I define “sovereignty” as the supreme authority to make decisions for a political organization. I believe that sovereigns can delegate the authority to make certain decisions to international institutions without surrendering supreme authority, which is the essence of sovereignty. This process describes what has transpired in the European Union. Sovereigns can also take back the authority they have delegated. Moreover, I do not think that sovereignty is divisible. My views are drawn from Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty, trans. and ed. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Mariya Grinberg, “Unconstrained Sovereignty: Delegation of Authority and Reversibility,” University of Chicago, October 22, 2018; and Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. and ed. George Schwab (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

58. 

Robert Jackson, Sovereignty: Evolution of an Idea (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2007), pp. 78–113.

59. 

Jeff D. Colgan and Robert O. Keohane, “The Liberal Order Is Rigged: Fix It Now or Watch It Wither,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 96, No. 3 (May/June 2017), p. 42, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2017-04-17/liberal-order-rigged.

60. 

Alberto Alemanno, “Beyond Consultations: Reimagining EU Participatory Politics” (Brussels: Reshaping European Democracy project, Carnegie Europe, December 5, 2018), https://carnegieendowment.org/files/Alemanno_EU_Politics_Dec20182.pdf.

61. 

Harold D. Clarke, Matthew Goodwin, and Paul Whiteley, Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 69–72, 86, 111–115, 141, 166–170, 173.

62. 

Ibid., p. 141.

63. 

Robert Kuttner, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), p. 74.

64. 

Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, “Restoring the Role of the Nation-State in the Liberal International Order,” address to the German Marshall Fund, Brussels, Belgium, December 4, 2018, https://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2018/12/287770.htm.

65. 

M.D.R. Evans and Jonathan Kelley, “National Pride in the Developed World Survey Data from 24 Nations,” International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Vol. 14, No. 3 (September 2002), pp. 303–338, doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/14.3.303; Michael Keating and John McGarry, eds., Minority Nationalism and the Changing International Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Mitchell Young, Eric Zuelow, and Andreas Sturm, Nationalism in a Global Era: The Persistence of Nations (New York: Routledge, 2007).

66. 

Liberalism also has an important particularist dimension to it, which is more in line with nationalism and which should discourage liberal states from trying to remake the world in their own image. Specifically, liberalism places a high premium on tolerance, mainly because it is based on the sound assumption that it is impossible to reach universal agreement about first principles. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion, pp. 53–54. Thus, one might expect liberal states to work out a modus vivendi with non-liberal states and not try to create a world populated solely by liberal democracies. When it comes to international politics, however, the universalistic strand of liberalism tends to trump the particularistic strand, which means liberal states tend to be intolerant toward other kinds of political systems.

67. 

Clarke, Goodwin, and Whiteley, Brexit, pp. 11, 23, 53, 59, 70, 102–103, 109, 113, 122–124, 166–170, 173, 205, 207–208. Although immigration and open borders are treated separately from sovereignty in Brexit, these issues are closely linked. After all, Britain is bent on exiting the EU so that it can regain authority over its borders, which is now largely in the hands of the EU.

68. 

Ibid., pp. 222–229; John B. Judis, The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt against Globalization (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2018), pp. 43, 95–98; and European Commission, “Public Opinion in the European Union,” Standard Eurobarometer 90, Autumn 2018 (Brussels: European Commission, November 2018), pp. 12–15.

69. 

The subsequent discussion of Bretton Woods and hyperglobalization—or what is sometimes called neoliberalism—draws heavily on Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011). See also Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); Kuttner, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?; Dani Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, March 1997); Dani Rodrik, One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017); and Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited: Anti-Globalization in the Era of Trump (New York: W.W. Norton, 2017).

70. 

The Bretton Woods system, which was negotiated at the end of World War II, focused mainly on establishing a monetary order built around fixed exchange rates. That core element of the system collapsed in the early 1970s, although Western countries remained committed to limiting capital flows and trade liberalization. Rodrik refers to this remaining set of commitments as the Bretton Woods consensus, not the Bretton Woods system. See Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox, pp. 69–76, 95–101. In this article, the Bretton Woods consensus refers to the entire period from 1945 to the end of the 1980s.

71. 

John Gerard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Spring 1982), pp. 379–415, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2706527.

72. 

Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox, p. 77.

73. 

Ibid., p. 163.

74. 

Automation is also responsible for the disappearance of a substantial number of jobs, although it is difficult to determine the relative importance of automation and outsourcing. See Susan N. Houseman, “Understanding the Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment,” Working Paper 18-287 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, June 2018), doi.org/10.17848/wp18-287; and Claire Cain Miller, “The Long-Term Jobs Killer Is Not China. It's Automation,” New York Times, December 21, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs-killer-is-not-china-its-automation.html.

75. 

David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (London: Hurst, 2017), pp. 147–192. On the human costs of these “progressively worsening labor market opportunities,” see Ann Case and Angus Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, Spring 2017), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/casetextsp17bpea.pdf.

76. 

Drew DeSilver, “For Most U.S. Workers, Real Wages Have Barely Budged in Decades” (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, August 7, 2018), http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/; and Edward N. Wolff, “Inequality and Rising Profitability in the United States, 1947–2012,” International Review of Applied Economics, Vol. 29, No. 6 (November 2015), pp. 741–769, doi.org/10.1080/02692171.2014.956704.

77. 

Facundo Alvaredo et al., “World Inequality Report, 2018: Executive Summary” (Paris: World Inequality Lab, 2017), https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-summary-english.pdf.

78. 

Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017).

79. 

Judis, The Nationalist Revival, pp. 47–80, 117–142.

80. 

Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 155.

81. 

Ibid., pp. 95–96, 344–347; and Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox, pp. 108–109.

82. 

Tooze, Crashed.

83. 

Ashoka Mody, EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016).

84. 

Rudi Dornbusch, “Euro Fantasies,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 5 (September/October 1996), pp. 110–124, doi.org/10.2307/20047747; Martin Feldstein, “EMU and International Conflict,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 6 (November/December 1997), pp. 60–73, doi.org/10.2307/20048276; Josef Joffe, “The Euro: The Engine That Couldn't,” New York Review of Books, December 4, 1997, pp. 26–31; and Paul Krugman, “The Plight of the Hapless EMU,” Fortune, December 21, 1998, pp. 34–36.

85. 

For some different perspectives on how to reform the order, see Colgan and Keohane, “The Liberal Order Is Rigged”; Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, “Liberal World: The Resilient Order,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 97, No. 4 (July/August 2018), pp. 16–24, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2018-06-14/liberal-world; Mazarr, Summary of the Building a Sustainable International Order Project; and Kori Schake, America vs the West: Can the Liberal World Order Be Preserved? (Melbourne, Australia: Penguin Random House, 2018).

86. 

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, for example, puts limits only on U.S. and Russian arsenals, but not the Chinese arsenal, which is one reason it has collapsed. The treaty will have to be renegotiated to include all three countries. Andrew E. Kramer, “The I.N.F. Treaty, Explained,” New York Times, October 23, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/world/europe/inf-treaty-russia-united-states-trump-nuclear.html.

87. 

In fact, there is abundant evidence that states often continue trading with each other when they are at war, which is the most intense form of security competition. Jack S. Levy and Katherine Barbieri, “Trading with the Enemy during Wartime,” Security Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Spring 2004), pp. 1–47, doi.org/10.1080/09636410490914059.

88. 

Michael J. Mazarr, Timothy R. Heat, and Astrid Stuth Cevallos, China and the International Order (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2018); and Oliver Stuenkel, Post-Western World: How Emerging Powers Are Remaking Global Order (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2016), pp. 120–180.

89. 

The WTO, which is likely to be part of the new international order, contains provisions that allow for economic competition within the confines of a bounded order. Specifically, it is possible for a group of countries to set up a preferential trade agreement that lowers tariffs and facilitates cooperation among the members, while discriminating against nonmembers. The Trans-Pacific Partnership discussed below is such an agreement.

90. 

Martin Feldstein, “Tariffs Should Target Chinese Lawlessness, Not the Trade Deficit,” Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/tariffs-should-target-chinese-lawlessness-not-the-trade-deficit-11545955628. See also Derek Scissors and Daniel Blumenthal, “China Is a Dangerous Rival, and America Should Treat It Like One,” New York Times, January 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/opinion/us-china-trade.html; and Adam Segal, “When China Rules the Web: Technology in Service of the State,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 97, No. 5 (September/October 2018), pp. 10–18, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-08-13/when-china-rules-web.

91. 

Jennifer Lind, “Life in China's Asia: What Regional Hegemony Would Look Like,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 97, No. 2 (March/April 2018), pp. 71–82, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-02-13/life-chinas-asia.

92. 

David A. Lake, “Economic Openness and Great Power Competition: Lessons for China and the United States,” Chinese Journal of International Politics, Vol. 11, No. 3 (September 2018), pp. 237–270, doi.org/10.1093/cjip/poy010.

93. 

See inter alia Edward Luce, “The New Era of US-China Decoupling,” Financial Times, December 20, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/019b1856-03c0-11e9-99df-6183d3002ee1; Raymond Zhong and Paul Mozur, “For the U.S. and China, a Technology Cold War That's Freezing Over,” New York Times, March 23, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/trump-china-tariffs-tech-cold-war.html; Chris Uhlmann and Angus Grigg, “How the ‘Five Eyes’ Cooked Up the Campaign to Kill Huawei,” Sydney Morning Herald, December 13, 2018, https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/how-the-five-eyes-cooked-up-the-campaign-to-kill-huawei-20181213-p50m24.html; “U.S.-China Trade Fight Risks Fragmenting Global Market, Says Beijing Ambassador,” Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-china-trade-fight-risks-fragmenting-global-market-says-beijings-ambassador-to-the-u-s-1543228321; David E. Sanger et al., “In 5G Race with China, U.S. Pushes Allies to Fight Huawei,” New York Times, January 26, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/26/us/politics/huawei-china-us-5g-technology.html; and Martin Wolf, “The Challenge of One World, Two Systems,” Financial Times, January 29, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/b20a0d62-23b1-11e9-b329-c7e6ceb5ffdf.

94. 

The economic and military competition between Britain and Germany before World War I is also instructive in this regard. See Markus Brunnermeier, Rush Doshi, and Harold James, “Beijing's Bismarckian Ghosts: How Great Powers Compete Economically,” Washington Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Fall 2018), pp. 161–176, doi.org/10.1080/0163660X.2018.1520571.

95. 

There is a small chance that China will not continue its impressive rise and Russia will badly falter in the decades ahead, while the United States grows increasingly powerful. Should that happen, the international system would move from multipolarity back to unipolarity, which raises the obvious question: What would the international order look like, given that the sole pole would be a liberal democracy? Some U.S. policymakers would surely be tempted to try to create another liberal international order, but few are likely to advocate pursuing the ambitious policies that failed so badly in the post–Cold War period. Instead, they are likely to back efforts to erect a less ambitious liberal order. That effort, however, is likely to fail and lead to an agnostic international order.

96. 

Russia is unlikely to create a bounded order of its own if it stays on the sidelines, as it would not be waging security competition with either side. In the unlikely event that Russia needs its own bounded order, it heads a few weak regional institutions that might serve as the foundation for that order: the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Eurasian Customs Union, and the Eurasian Economic Union.

© 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.