The Liberal International Order’s Popularity Problem

The liberal international order — as phrase, as policy framework, as mantra — enjoys enormous prestige among U.S. foreign-policy elites. A leitmotif of the Obama administration, this phrase deserves its prominence, for it neatly encapsulates some of the most enduring diplomatic achievements of the postwar era. The liberal international order may have been limited to the anti-communist bloc during the Cold War; it has never lacked for intellectual adversaries; and much of the international order has always been illiberal; but not for nothing did global institutions grounded in consensus, in the spirit of free trade and in international law extend their reach after 1991. They proliferated because disparate peoples and nations wanted to be a part of the liberal international order. Often those who had first-hand experience with authoritarianism and with command economies had the keenest understanding of this order. What West Germans adapted to in the 1950s was what Poles were rushing to embrace in the 1990s.

The philosophy is sound, the past record illustrious. Even so, the liberal international order has one debilitating weakness as an American foreign-policy doctrine. This is the great difficulty of translating it into the language, the sentiments and the symbols of domestic American politics. There is a difference between a good idea and good idea that can be easily defended in public.

Four domestic-political problems accrue to the liberal international order.

1. It is bland

The liberal international order is academic term of art, and this is exactly how it sounds. The phrase itself has no rhetorical merit whatsoever. Two unexciting adjectives followed by one dour noun, the liberal international order compares unfavorably to the West or to containment or to making the world safe for democracy. It is the kind of unwieldy, unlovely phrase any good speechwriter would avoid. Even a Latin phrase can deliver a more poignant and memorable message, as when John F. Kennedy stood before the Schöneberg Rathaus in West Berlin and declared to the cheering public — civus romanus sum. (Ich bin ein Berliner was an even better phrase of course.)

Likewise, FDR hit upon the Four Freedoms for which World War II was being fought. These four freedoms would be woven into the liberal international order that FDR did so much to create. Yet as a phrase the alliterative Four Freedoms was so approachable, so vivid that Norman Rockwell could successfully illustrate it: his images were a part of the war effort. One wonders how a Norman Rockwell, had he been given the task, would illustrate the liberal international order.

An even tougher task would be to illustrate the rules-based liberal international order, the awkward compound adjective sometimes added to an already maladroit phrase. Winston Churchill might have been fighting for the rules-based liberal international order in practice, but he would never have asked Britons and Americans to fight for such a thing in theory. He would have found words closer to human emotion.

2. It employs the word liberal

“Liberal” is among the most confusing words in the American political lexicon. It used denote what this word still means in Europe, laissez-faire or Manchester liberalism. Then FDR appropriated the word for his and his party’s political purposes. As FDR intuited, the American ear preferred liberal to socialist or social democratic, and ever since the 1930s liberal has had its own peculiar connotation in the United States. To be a liberal has meant to be a defender of the welfare state or, more simply, to be a supporter of the Democratic Party. Liberals stood somewhere on the Left, conservatives on the Right. Putting the word liberal at the front of the liberal international order is anything but a neutral choice.

“Liberal” is among the most confusing words in the American political lexicon.

Technically speaking, liberal as a modifier of international order conveys more the pre-FDR meaning of the word, accenting the free-trade component of the liberal international order. Perhaps it also signifies liberty as opposed to authoritarianism. Practically speaking, liberal implies an association with the Democratic Party to an American audience. Although there is considerable bi-partisan support for the liberal international order, a project advanced as much by Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan as by Harry Truman or JFK, advocating for a liberal international order seems like a partisan activity. The Obama administration’s outspoken enthusiasm for the liberal international order opened the door to a conservative opposition that tethered the liberal international order to the Democratic Party, on the misleading assumption that a conservative international order would be something else entirely.

3. It sounds expensive

Defending the national interest is an easy sell, a necessary sell, for any American politician. Likewise, bi-lateral or multi-lateral alliances have an obvious utility. Of these the transatlantic alliance resonates most naturally with American citizens, because they can associate it with D-Day, with the Berlin airlift or with Ronald Reagan admonishing Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the wall. Upholding the transatlantic alliance is the antidote to world war, the historical argument runs. It is something for which sacrifices can be made: the costs of not doing it would be greater than the costs of doing it. In general, an alliance is a two-way commitment. NATO’s article five can be invoked in America’s defense, as it was after September 11, just as it can be invoked in the defense of the non-American NATO members.

The liberal international order is not an alliance, and defending it presents a severe political challenge to those who believe in it. The liberal international order rests on two unbounded abstractions, and obligations to defend an international entity without limit are potentially terrifying, as are obligations to defend order. The internationalism of the liberal international order offers no prioritization of threats or interests.

Committing the United States to defending international order frames American leadership as a limitlessly expensive proposition.

Containment suffered from this problem as well, as Walter Lippmann contended in a series of prescient articles gathered into his 1947 book, Cold War; but even the practice of containment was more precise, more circumscribed than the defense of the liberal international order. Where communism threatened to advance, it had to be contained. The liberal international order is at risk of deteriorating or diminishing everywhere — in Western Europe, in the Middle East, across Asia and Latin America. Order is by definition a global concept. Committing the United States to defending international order frames American leadership as a limitlessly expensive proposition, especially if the gains from leading the international order are not immediately visible.

4. It has no cultural or historical associations

The liberal international order may be a cognate for the West. Certainly it emerges from Euro-American diplomatic history. The political norms to which it is dedicated have their origins in representative government and in capitalism, phenomena rooted in the history of Western Europe and the United States. The transatlantic institutions developed in the 1940s and 1950s are the liberal international order in embryo, and no doubt the most earnest and consistent advocates of today’s liberal international order sit in Washington, London and Berlin — in the West, as it were.

The West is too indelibly stained with the legacy of empire.

Yet they are wise not to label their affiliation an affiliation with the West. The West is too indelibly stained with the legacy of empire. In the United States, the West conjures a connection to Europe that is shared by only a portion of the population. It may have been acceptable for John Foster Dulles to intone the glories of Western civilization, and to contrast them to the horrors of Asiatic despotism over there in Moscow and Beijing, but this a more than old-fashioned approach for twenty-first century America. The academic world has dedicated itself, in the past forty years, to criticizing and excising the ghosts of Western imperialism. This is the reflected in the term, liberal international order. In freeing itself from such controversial cultural and historical associations, however, the liberal international order has been freed of all cultural and historical associations.

In the battle for hearts and minds, crucial to all politics, the liberal international order is all mind and no heart.

To return to JFK’s speech in Berlin: its rhetorical power derived from an American President’s emotional ties to his German audience, which in turn derived from his affinity for Berlin (Ich bin ein Berliner) and from a common affinity for Western liberties (civus romanus sum). By contrast, the liberal international order is post-historical and post-cultural. Empty of chauvinism, it is empty of symbolic meaning and unmoored from historical narrative. It is not a phrase that could mobilize or galvanize anyone. In the battle for hearts and minds, crucial to all politics, the liberal international order is all mind and no heart.

Case Study: The U.S. Election

The 2016 presidential election pitted a former Secretary of State against a foreign-policy ingénue. Hillary Clinton was upholding a foreign-policy tradition that stretches back to 1945, its soundness self-evident to the vast majority of foreign-policy practitioners and experts. Putting aside the respective characters of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and putting aside the content of their foreign-policy agendas, it is clear (at least in retrospect) that Trump held a number of rhetorical advantages in the domain of foreign policy. Hillary Clinton spoke often and emphatically of American interests and of American security on the campaign trail, but the larger frame for her foreign policy was the liberal international order, which she had ardently supported as President Obama’s Secretary of State. Throughout the campaign, she struggled to connect her foreign-policy aspirations with her audience of potential voters. She was hemmed in by the four domestic-political vulnerabilities of the liberal international order.

Meanwhile, Trump was exploiting these same vulnerabilities. He was anything but bland in his discussions of foreign policy, speaking either about visceral fears of terrorism or the unapologetic assertion of national will. He presented himself as the conservative alternative to eight years of liberal foreign-policy “disasters,” folding the Iraq War seamlessly into this historical record. He was the populist outsider to Washington and its foreign-policy elite, an avatar of conservative nationalism arisen from the will of the people. Trump consistently rallied his supporters against the specter of an overly expensive American foreign policy, alleging that the U.S. bears the costs of its excessive commitments and promises, much as the “globalism” of global finance amounts to the exploitation of American workers.

Finally, Trump’s aim was to make America great again, almost the antithesis of defending the liberal international order. The cultural and historical associations were not those of Western civilization. They were purely national, as Trump would reiterate by making “America first” the thesis statement of his inaugural address. The “again” in making America great again recalls some lost golden age, and the agent is the “we,” the nation and its particular culture rather than the culture-less, history-less machinery that advances the liberal international order. Trump’s victory resides more in the vacuum he was filling than the vision he was promoting.

Defenders of the liberal international order should closely study the 2016 election. Scrutinizing this election will not refine their understanding of the liberal international order, but it may help them to articulate and argue for this important abstraction in the rough-and-tumble of domestic politics.