It will take great sacrifice to defend the liberal order
There must be a public education campaign about the growing dangers to security and the world America has helped to build
Although the US has been doing it for decades, the task of defending the liberal order has never been an easy sell to the American people. This is not just because “liberal international order” is a term that, although beloved by academics and policy wonks, hardly resonates with the average voter.
It is also because defending the liberal order has required making extraordinary exertions: defending faraway countries, patrolling distant frontiers, catalyzing collective action on myriad diplomatic and economic challenges. It means accepting the idea that the US will make the world’s problems its own. That is a lot to ask of any country, particularly one as geographically fortunate and naturally secure as the US.
Historically, domestic consensus in support of US internationalism was supported by a three-legged stool of fear, hope and political leadership. For much of the postwar era, the memory of the traumas that had befallen the US during World War II — the last time the international order had collapsed — and the omnipresent threat from a totalitarian Soviet enemy convinced Americans on the whole that the costs of global engagement were ultimately less than the costs of geopolitical withdrawal.
Yet fear was always complemented by hope. There was a shared sense that the US was undertaking a grand mission to vindicate democratic values and improve the lot of humanity. This aspiration not simply to live in the world, but fundamentally to transform it, traces back to the very founding of the republic. Later, it helped inspire the Marshall Plan, the creation of alliances that bound America to its fellow democracies, the promotion of human rights and liberal political values, and other key elements of Washington’s order-building project.
Today, however, all three legs of the stool have grown weaker. The end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the Soviet Union made it harder to win support on the basis of fear. The 9/11 attacks provided, for a brief time, another reminder that there remained serious dangers in the world, but the stimulus wore off amid long and unsatisfying wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those wars also damaged the “hope” leg of the stool, leading to a growing perception that energetic US statecraft was as likely to mess up the world as to make it better. Combined with the impact of the great recession and its aftermath, they led many Americans to conclude that the US should concentrate, as President Obama put it, on nation-building at home rather than nation-building abroad.
The political leadership leg of the stool has collapsed even more spectacularly. Barack Obama, for all his virtues, always manifested a certain ambivalence about America’s expansive global role. Donald Trump has taken a far starker view. He portrays the liberal order as the cause of many of America’s problems; he harps on the things the US has gotten wrong in the world rather than the things it has gotten right. The US president is no longer the chief defender of the liberal order; he is its chief critic.
Admittedly, public opinion polling shows that Americans’ views of alliances, trade and other international initiatives have not changed remarkably during Trump’s tenure. But the president has the world’s strongest megaphone, and the longer he inveighs against that order and the US role in sustaining it, the weaker domestic support for that endeavor will become.
So how might a post-Trump cohort of American leaders rebuild support for a robust defense of the liberal order? It will require strengthening all three legs of the stool.
For starters, there must be a public education campaign about the growing dangers to US security and the world America has helped to build. This is not really a matter of focusing on threats like Daesh, North Korea and Iran, troubling as they are. Rather, it should center on the threats posed by the authoritarian great powers: Russia and especially China.
Although Russia’s power base is limited, it has shown a propensity to use violence to upset the liberal order in Europe, and it has demonstrated an ability to sow political instability in the US and other Western countries. China is a totalitarian regime that could ultimately prove every bit as powerful and threatening as the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and it has already proclaimed its intention to compete with the US for global leadership. Americans need to understand that if these countries succeed in reshaping things to their liking, the world will be less peaceful, less democratic and less congenial to the security and well-being of the US.
Equally important will be rediscovering positive, hopeful narratives. This does not mean whitewashing the history of US foreign policy or sweeping the nation’s various mistakes and misdeeds under the rug. Yet if self-criticism is admirable, what is more important today is to remind Americans of the great successes the US has had in building a better world — one that has seen democratic values spread far and wide, countless people lifted out of poverty, and the longest period of greatpower peace in the modern era — because that will be critical in rallying them to the task of defending the international order today.
Finally, all these efforts must feature strong and vocal leadership from the top. US officials must explain, in everyday language, why the liberal order is worth American sacrifice. They must explain what the consequences of its collapse would be. This is not an impossible task: The question of whether the liberal order will be preserved is ultimately a question of whether a world in which the US itself has thrived will endure or perish.
But if the American president doesn’t make that argument, we can hardly expect Americans to buy into it on their own. — Bloomberg.