Zero-Sum Nation

Liberal world order, RIP

Throughout the Obama years and into Trump 1.0 I taught a class at NYU whose subject, under various titles, was whether the United States was more a force for good or for ill in the world. Most of my students–American, Emirati, other–were sure they knew the answer in advance. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan: America was the country that waged war on the places that resisted its will. My attempted antidote was a class on the American role in the creation of the post-war order: the UN and NATO and GATT as well as public goods like patrolling the sea lanes. That usually fell flat.

Nobody cares about patrolling the sea lanes until somebody threatens to put up a tollbooth on one of them. In fact, most of us might not have been sure what a “sea lane” was until Iran turned the Strait of Hormuz into a worldwide traffic jam. Now, at least, we understand why it matters so much to have a global traffic cop. Asian economies, dependent on oil from the Gulf, have spiraled into a recession, and are now spending a fortune propping up their currencies as investors flee to. . .the dollar. Even in the United States, an oil-exporting nation, drivers are paying about a third more at the pump than they did before the war.

Present at the creation: George C. Marshall

It occurs to me now that the “liberal world order” never seemed real to my students, or to myriad skeptics of American power, because it was a set of background conditions. “Regime change” and “counterinsurgency” and “democracy promotion” were the names of acts, and of course violent acts; enforcing trade rules and maritime law, monitoring capital flows and outbreaks of infectious disease, were among the invisible mechanisms that allowed our world to keep rolling along on its casters. As with air traffic control, you only become aware of them when they break down.

The Age of Enlightened Self-Interest

Now, of course, the whole eighty-year-old system is breaking down–the UN and NATO, the American network of alliances, the global trading system, international law, the norm against territorial aggression. Whatever will take its place will probably not be an “order” but rather a set of regional blocs and coalitions of shared interests and shotgun marriages and anxious shuttling between an American and a Chinese imperium. Even the harshest critics of the liberal order may find themselves yearning for its restoration.

My students assumed that the United States did bad things for bad–that is, selfish–reasons. In fact, or so I tried to explain to them, the United States is never more high-minded than when it launches one of its ruinous interventions. Think of the colonization of the Philippines, carried out in the name not of extracting resources–we hardly did–but of bringing “self-government” to a people who had languished under the Spanish yoke. The fact that we killed 200,000-odd Filipinos in order to establish our dominion in no way diminished our sense of high purpose. (See, for example, Tony Smith’s American Mission.)

But those high-minded ideals also guided our best acts. After World War II, when the other great powers had been laid low, the United States could have ruled the world as Rome once had. It chose, instead, to enmesh and confine its own power in a system of institutions and rules. (See Stewart Patrick’s Best Laid Plans.) This was an act, not of selflessness but of enlightened self-interest. All great powers, as Princeton’s John Ikenberry writes in his 2020 A World Safe For Democracy, seek to shape a world order congenial to their own interests; American statesmen concluded that our national interests would be best served by a system that enshrined American values of democracy, the rule of law and free markets.

The Cold War changed those plans. Ikenberry notes that planners under FDR had envisioned a more “universalistic” system in which security was largely invested in the UN and economic power in the IMF, the World Bank and the global trade regime. The threat of Soviet aggression had the effect of subsuming that order into a more explicitly security-oriented one directly dependent on U.S. military power and the American economy and alliance system. Yet the essential characteristics remained: Washington dominated NATO, but it still only had one vote; the U.S. Navy patrolled the world’s sea lanes, but everyone benefited. “More countries,” as Ikenberry writes, “wanted in than wanted out.”

. . .And of Brutal Self-Interest

Donald Trump has not, of course, killed this vast network of rules and norms and institutions by himself. The Cold War was a kind of artificial adhesive that kept the system together; American military protection mattered less the moment the evil empire dissolved. At the same time, the collapse of the Soviet Union made America a “hyperpower” that believed it could accomplish almost everything it wanted by itself. George W. Bush sapped the foundations of the system by invading Afghanistan without Nato allies and invading Iraq without UN sanction. The rise of non-Western and non-democratic powers also undermined what Ikenberry calls the “club” aspect of the system–the like-mindedness of Western states. China, of course, has emerged as a beneficiary of global free trade and the rule of law and now threatens both.

Trump 1.0 only modestly accelerated this process of erosion, but the unleashed Trump of the second term has taken a bludgeon both to institutions like NATO and to norms like non-aggression. Trump literally cannot understand the positive-sum logic that systems that afford the global superpower no special advantage–above all, free trade–are nevertheless in America’s long-term interest.He believes that America’s coercive power renders both institutions and allies superfluous. The only countries he actually seems to like are the Gulf monarchies, but one of them, Oman, turns out to have been secretly negotiating with Iran to share the revenue from the proposed tollbooth. George W. Bush discovered how useful allies could be after the Iraq War went south. Maybe Trump will learn the same lesson–though I very much doubt it.

America shouldn’t do bad things for good, or good-sounding, reasons. But it’s much to be preferred to doing bad things for bad reasons, like seizing Venezuela’s leader in order to get access to its oil. Hypocrisy is better than cynicism. Leaders from Woodrow Wilson to JFK to Bush fils had professed ideals to which they, and the United States, could be held by others, and by its own citizens. Trump has none; he confirms the cynical view of America’s global role that so many people both here and abroad have long held. My students were wrong in imagining the world as a jungle in which the American lion roamed unchecked; but they wouldn’t be wrong in saying so now. I could no longer teach that course, since the answer to my question has become as obvious as they once thought it was.