So, we keep searching for the appropriate framing to understand the impact of Donald Trump on the international system. Can we adequately describe the impact of Trump on the progress of global governance; the consequences for  geopolitical competition and rivalry; the longer term relationships in trade, investment and security? What will be the future shape the liberal international order (LIO) and will it even continue to exist?  There is an ongoing intellectual struggle to understand the consequences and the ability of the Order  to cope with the chaos created by Trump.

I was fingering through various sources. I was trying very hard to understand what conclusions my colleagues had reached in their assessment of the state of the Liberal Order and then the consequences for the international system of Trump actions. .And, I came across this word picture that seemed ‘on the mark’. It was created by my good friend and colleague from CFR, Stewart Patrick. Somewhat strangely It comes from his 2009 book The Best Laid Plans: The Origins of American Multilateralism and the Dawn of the Cold War. Now, what’s notable is that the picture drawn by Patrick was done well before Trump.  It captures an American foreign policy course not chosen at the end of World War II. But in broad strokes it seems to very well describe Trump foreign policy today: 

With these drawbacks, [to multilateralism] a reasonable observer might have expected the mid-twentieth-century United States to avoid multilateral arrangements altogether in favor of a mixed strategy of unilateralism and unequal bilateral arrangements. This would have widened U.S. freedom of action, allowed Washington to coerce and extract concessions from weaker countries, and protected the United States from the incursions of inter-governmental governmental arrangements. (Kindle Edition, Kindle Locations 106-109)

Now that pretty much fits Trump policy – unilateralist,  preferring bilateral trade and security alliances and a strongly anti-multilateralist approach. Well, what might have been U.S. policy at the end of World War II and the commencement of the Cold War has apparently become reality today.

Writing in FarEastForum, the editorial board of ANU suggested, what I anticipate is a relatively widely-held view in the IR community:

The priority now is to protect the international institutions from the United States and keep the multilateral system open to the eventual re-participation of the United States.

As Shiro Armstrong writes in this week’s feature essay, ‘the threat to the global trading system will only be met by a concerted response by other stakeholders in the global trade regime. Such a response needs coordination and strategic action that doubles down on the rules-based global system’.

I assumed, maybe foolishly, that in the IR community there was just a debate around the architecture and direction of the LIO, not whether the system and its workings existed. That’s why I was, to put it mildly, dumbfounded by a recent Graham Allison piece in Foreign Affairs that, in fact, called into question the definition, structure and operation of the LIO. Now, I thought, possibly just hoped, that the article by Graham Allison in the FA ‘The Myth of the Liberal Order’ would not raise controversy over the shape and evolution of the liberal international order, though the title gave me some pause. But, then again, I was reminded of Graham’s persistence over too many years and his insistence of the value of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ notwithstanding his unwillingness to acknowledge, or respond meaningfully to the stream of criticism over his assertions of its truth in international relations.

Allison make it clear that the conventional IR framing is well overdone:

Yet rather than seek to return to an imagined past in which the United States molded the world in its image, Washington should limit its efforts to ensuring sufficient order abroad to allow it to concentrate on reconstructing a viable liberal democracy at home.

As he subtitles the LIO apparently is an ‘historical accident’. Allison brings a realist cast that sees the order as a product of the division of the world into two armed camps for decades of the Cold War:

Order emerged from a balance of power, which allowed the two superpowers to develop the constraints that preserved what U.S. President John F. Kennedy called, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the “precarious status quo.”

So, no conscious U.S. leadership to build security nor institutions that would promote prosperity and further the rule of law:

The United States has never promoted liberalism abroad when it believed that doing so would pose a significant threat to its vital interests at home. Nor has it ever refrained from using military force to protect its interests when the use of force violated international rules.

And while the United States did exercise military action,  possibly most egregiously in Iraq, still to see decades of international leadership as nothing more than a realist effort to stymie Soviet encroachment and protect U.S. vital interests is startling.

For Graham, then, Trump and his chaos is but one strategic concern and not the greatest one that the U.S. faces today. For Graham contemporary threats include the rise of China, the resurgence of Russia and the relative decline of U.S. global power.

The threats identified are significant but in my opinion these challenges do not vitiate the consequences posed by Trump to the international system nor do they erase decades of U.S. leadership.  What then is the LIO and presumably its U.S. origin?  For that I would turn to Allison’s Harvard colleague, Joe Nye.  As Nye writes recently presented in Project Syndicate, it is reasonable to conceive of the LIO as a conscious American effort:

After World War II, Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman – and others around the world – drew the lesson that the US could not afford to turn inward again.

Together, they created a system of security alliances, multilateral institutions, and relatively open economic policies that comprise Pax Americana or the “liberal international order.” Whatever one calls these arrangements, for 70 years it has been US foreign policy to defend them. Today, they are being called into question by the rise of powers such as China and a new wave of populism within the world’s democracies, which Trump tapped in 2016, when he became the first candidate of a major US political party to call into question the post-1945 international order.

The question for a post-Trump president is whether the US can successfully address both aspects of its exceptional role. Can the next president promote democratic values without military intervention and crusades, and at the same time take a non-hegemonic lead in establishing and maintaining the institutions needed for a world of interdependence?

I think Allison’s assertion of a ‘Myth’ of the Liberal Order is in fact – a ‘Myth’ itself.

Image Credit: CTVnews.ca