John Mearsheimer 注定失败 自由国际秩序的兴衰

注定失败 自由国际秩序的兴衰

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

冷战后建立的自由国际秩序在 2019 年崩溃了。它从一开始就存在缺陷，因此注定要失败。自由民主在全球的传播——建立这一秩序的关键——因强调自决的民族主义而面临强烈抵制。一些目标国家还出于安全原因抵制美国促进自由民主的努力。此外，自由秩序要求各国将重大决策权下放给国际机构，并允许难民和移民轻松跨越国界，这也引发了问题。然而，现代民族国家重视主权和民族认同，当机构变得强大且边界变得模糊时，问题必然会随之而来。此外，自由秩序不可或缺的超全球化在自由民主国家的中下层阶级中造成了经济问题，引发了对该秩序的强烈反对。最后，自由秩序加速了中国的崛起，帮助该体系从单极转变为多极。自由国际秩序只有在单极体制下才有可能实现。新的多极世界将有三个现实主义秩序：一个促进合作的薄弱国际秩序，以及两个有边界的秩序——一个由中国主导，另一个由美国主导——它们准备在彼此之间展开安全竞争。

结 论

美国及其盟友在冷战期间建立了一个强大的秩序，但它既不是国际秩序，也不是自由秩序。这是一个有界秩序，其主要目的是与苏联主导的对手有界秩序进行安全竞争。这两个秩序的核心都是现实主义的，不是自由主义或共产主义的。冷战后单极世界的到来，让胜利的西方——以美国为首——开始建立一个真正的自由国际秩序。人们希望它能成为一个和平繁荣世界的帮手。

在 20 世纪 90 年代和新世纪的头几年，自由秩序似乎将按预期发挥作用，并将长期存在。倡导者和设计者可以指出许多成功之处，同时也承认一些失败之处。但从 2005 年左右开始，该秩序开始遇到严重问题，这些问题随着时间的推移而成倍增加，以至于它开始崩溃。这一结果本应是可以预见的，因为该秩序本身就蕴含着自我毁灭的种子，因此注定会早晚失败。

美国及其盟友试图建立自由国际秩序，但面临三个主要问题。首先，它要求体系中的自由国家，尤其是美国，推行高度修正主义和野心勃勃的政权更迭政策，而在一个强调主权和自决的民族主义仍然是一股强大力量的时代，这一政策几乎注定会失败。该政策还受到全球和地区层面的权力平衡政治的阻碍。

其次，通过推动人员跨境自由流动和将重大决策权下放给国际机构，前任

自由秩序的扩张在自由国家内部造成了重大的政治问题。其结果往往与民族认同和主权的信念相冲突，而民族认同和主权对现代民族国家的大多数公民来说都非常重要。

第三，尽管一些人和国家从超全球化中受益，但它最终在自由民主国家内部造成了重大的经济和政治问题，最终导致对自由国际秩序的支持严重减弱。与此同时，超全球化带来的经济活力帮助中国迅速成为一个大国，而俄罗斯则在大约同一时间重新确立了自己的大国地位。全球力量平衡的这种转变结束了单极世界，而单极世界是自由世界秩序的先决条件。

在新兴的多极世界中，可能会出现一个现实主义的国际秩序，它将关注管理世界经济，并促进和维护军备控制协议。该秩序的重点将放在促进国家间合作上。此外，中国和美国可能会主导有限制的秩序，这将有助于推动中国及其盟友与美国及其盟友之间几乎肯定会发生的安全竞争。这种竞争既有经济层面的，也有军事层面的。

美国在抛弃自己辛辛苦苦建立的自由国际秩序时应该如何行动？首先，它应该抵制任何继续试图通过政权更迭在全球强行传播民主的诱惑。由于美国将被迫与中国和俄罗斯进行权力平衡政治，其在国外进行社会工程的能力将受到极大限制。然而，重塑世界的诱惑将永远存在，因为美国如此热切地相信自由民主的优点。但它应该抵制这种诱惑，因为进行自由主义十字军东征肯定会导致严重的麻烦。

其次，美国应寻求最大限度地发挥其在构成新兴国际秩序的经济机构中的影响力。这样做对于在不断变化的全球权力分配中保持尽可能有利的地位至关重要。毕竟，经济实力是军事实力的基础。华盛顿必须不允许中国主导这些机构，并利用由此产生的影响力以牺牲美国为代价获得权力。

第三，美国决策者应确保建立一个能够遏制中国扩张的强大有界秩序。这项任务要求建立诸如跨太平洋伙伴关系之类的经济机构以及类似于冷战时期北约的亚洲军事联盟。在此过程中，美国应该不遗余力地将俄罗斯拉出中国的轨道，并将其纳入美国主导的秩序。

总之，现在是美国外交政策机构认识到自由国际秩序是一项没有前途的失败事业的时候了。在可预见的未来，重要的秩序是现实主义秩序，必须为美国利益服务。

简介
到 2019 年，自由国际秩序显然陷入了困境。支撑它的板块正在移动，几乎无力修复和拯救它。事实上，这一秩序从一开始就注定要失败，因为它蕴含着自我毁灭的种子。

自由国际秩序的垮台让建立这一秩序并从中受益的西方精英感到震惊。1 这些精英坚信这一秩序曾经是、现在仍然是促进全球和平与繁荣的重要力量。他们中的许多人将其垮台归咎于唐纳德·特朗普总统。毕竟，他在 2016 年竞选总统时表达了对自由秩序的蔑视；自上任以来，他一直在推行似乎旨在摧毁它的政策。

然而，认为自由国际秩序陷入困境仅仅是因为特朗普的言论或政策，那就错了。事实上，还有更根本的问题在起作用，这解释了为什么特朗普能够成功挑战一个几乎得到西方外交政策精英普遍支持的秩序。本文的目的是确定自由世界秩序陷入大麻烦的原因，并确定将取代它的国际秩序类型。

我主要提出三组论点。首先，由于现代世界各国以各种方式紧密相连，秩序对于促进有效和及时的互动至关重要。国际秩序有多种类型，哪一种类型出现主要取决于全球权力分配。但当体系是单极体系时，唯一一极的政治意识形态也很重要。自由国际秩序只能在单极体系中出现，其中主导国家是自由民主国家。

其次，自二战以来，美国领导了两种不同的秩序。冷战秩序有时被错误地称为“自由国际秩序”，既不是自由的也不是国际的。这是一个主要局限于西方的有界秩序，在其所有关键维度上都是现实主义的。它具有某些与自由秩序一致的特征，但这些属性是基于现实主义逻辑的。另一方面，美国主导的后冷战秩序是自由的和国际的，因此与美国在冷战期间主导的有界秩序有着根本的不同。

第三，后冷战时期的自由国际秩序注定要崩溃，因为其所依赖的关键政策存在严重缺陷。在全球传播自由民主对于建立这样的秩序至关重要，但这不仅极其困难，而且往往会毒害与其他国家的关系，有时还会导致灾难性的战争。目标国家内部的民族主义是促进民主的主要障碍，但权力平衡政治也发挥着重要的阻碍作用。

此外，自由秩序倾向于优先考虑国际机构而不是国内考虑，以及其对多孔甚至开放边界的坚定承诺，对包括美国单极国家在内的主要自由国家本身产生了有害的政治影响。

这些政策在主权和民族认同等关键问题上与民族主义发生冲突。由于民族主义是地球上最强大的政治意识形态，每当两者发生冲突时，它总是胜过自由主义，从而从根本上破坏了秩序。

此外，超全球化试图将全球贸易和投资壁垒降至最低，导致整个自由世界失业、工资下降、收入不平等加剧。它还使国际金融体系变得不那么稳定，导致金融危机频发。这些麻烦随后演变成政治问题，进一步削弱了对自由秩序的支持。

超全球化经济以另一种方式破坏了秩序：它帮助单极国家以外的国家变得更加强大，这可能会破坏单极并终结自由秩序。这就是中国崛起所发生的事情，中国崛起与俄罗斯实力的复苏一起结束了单极时代。新兴的多极世界将由一个基于现实主义的国际秩序组成，该秩序将在管理世界经济、处理军备控制和处理气候变化等全球公域问题方面发挥重要作用。除了这一新的国际秩序之外，美国和中国还将领导有界秩序，这些秩序将在经济和军事领域相互竞争。2

本文的其余部分组织如下。首先，我解释了“秩序”一词的含义以及为什么秩序是国际政治的重要特征。其次，我描述了不同类型的秩序以及自由国际秩序将出现的情况。与此相关的是，我在第三部分研究了国际秩序兴起和衰落的原因。在第四部分，我描述了不同的冷战秩序。在接下来的三节中，我讲述了自由国际秩序的历史。然后，在接下来的四节中，我解释了它失败的原因。在倒数第二节中，我讨论了多极化下的新秩序将会是什么样子。结论简要总结了我的论点并提出了一些政策建议。

什么是秩序？秩序为何重要？
“秩序”是一组有组织的国际机构，有助于管理成员国之间的互动。3 秩序还可以帮助成员国与非成员国打交道，因为秩序不一定包括世界上的每个国家。此外，秩序可以包括具有区域或全球范围的机构。大国创造和管理秩序。

国际机构是秩序的基石，实际上是大国制定并同意遵守的规则，因为它们认为遵守这些规则符合它们的利益。这些规则规定了可接受的行为类型，禁止了不可接受的行为形式。4 不出所料，大国制定这些规则是为了满足自己的利益。但当这些规则不符合主导国家的切身利益时，这些国家要么忽视它们，要么重写它们。例如，在2003年伊拉克战争之前，小布什总统曾多次强调，即使美国的入侵违反了国际法，“美国也将尽一切努力确保国家安全……我不会坐以待毙，任由危险积聚。”5

秩序可以包含不同类型的机构，包括北大西洋公约组织（NATO）、《不扩散核武器条约》（NPT）或《华沙公约》等安全机构，以及国际货币基金组织（IMF）、北美自由贸易协定、经济合作与发展组织和世界银行等经济机构。它还可以包括处理环境问题的机构，例如应对气候变化的《巴黎协定》，以及更多层面的机构，例如欧盟（EU）、国际联盟和联合国（UN）。

秩序在现代国际体系中不可或缺，原因有二。首先，它们在一个高度相互依赖的世界中管理国家间关系。6 各国从事大量的经济活动，这促使它们建立机构和规则来规范这些互动并使其更有效率。但这种相互依赖并不局限于经济事务；它还包括环境和健康问题。例如，一个国家的污染必然会影响邻国的环境，而全球变暖的影响是普遍的，只能通过多边措施来应对。此外，致命疾病不需要护照就可以跨越国界，正如 1918-20 年致命的流感大流行所表明的那样。

各国在军事领域也相互联系，这导致它们结成联盟。为了给对手展示一种强大的力量，

为了在威慑失效时保持强大的威慑力或有效作战，盟国将受益于制定规定各成员国军队如何行动以及如何相互协调的规则。协调的必要性被放大，因为现代军队拥有种类繁多的武器，但并非所有武器都与盟国的武器兼容。想想北约和华沙条约组织军队拥有的各种各样的武器，更不用说协调这些联盟内部各战斗部队的行动有多困难。冷战期间，两个超级大国都维持着高度制度化的联盟——事实上是高度制度化的秩序——这并不奇怪。

其次，秩序在现代国际体系中不可或缺，因为它们帮助大国以符合大国利益的方式管理弱国的行为。7 具体而言，最强大的国家设计机构来约束弱国的行为，然后对它们施加巨大压力，迫使它们加入这些机构并无论如何遵守规则。然而，这些规则往往有利于体系中的弱国。

这种现象的一个很好的例子是超级大国在冷战期间努力建立核不扩散机制。为此，1968 年苏联和美国制定了《不扩散核武器条约》，该条约实际上规定任何没有核武器的成员国都不得获得核武器。当然，莫斯科和华盛顿的领导人不遗余力地让尽可能多的国家加入《不扩散核武器条约》。超级大国也是 1974 年核供应国集团成立的主要推动力，该集团旨在对向没有核武器但可能试图在市场上购买核武器的国家出售核材料和技术施加重大限制。

然而，如果强国认为这样做不符合它们的利益，那么构成秩序的机构就不能强迫它们遵守规则。换句话说，国际机构没有自己的生命力，因此没有权力告诉主要国家该做什么。它们只是大国的工具。然而，规则是任何制度的本质，有助于管理国家的行为，大国大多数时候都遵守规则。

底线是，在一个多方面相互依存的世界中，一套规则体系对于降低交易成本和帮助开展国家之间发生的众多互动是必不可少的。美国太平洋军事部队前指挥官哈里·哈里斯海军上将将自由国际秩序称为“全球操作系统”，抓住了这一点。8

秩序的类型
国际体系中的秩序有三个重要区别。第一个区别是国际秩序和有界秩序。一个秩序要想成为国际秩序，就必须包括世界上所有的大国。理想情况下，它将包含体系中的每个国家。相比之下，有界秩序由一组成员有限的机构组成。它们不包括所有大国，而且它们的范围通常是区域性的。在大多数情况下，它们由一个大国主导，尽管两个或多个大国有可能形成一个有界秩序，只要至少一个大国不参与其中。简而言之，国际秩序和有界秩序都是由大国创造和运行的。

国际秩序主要关注促进国家之间的合作。具体来说，它们有助于促进体系内大国之间的合作，或促进世界上几乎所有国家之间的合作。另一方面，有界秩序的主要目的是允许竞争对手大国之间进行安全竞争，而不是促进它们之间的合作。尽管如此，领导有界秩序的大国会努力促进成员国之间的合作，必要时还会胁迫它们。在有界秩序内进行高水平的合作对于与对立大国进行安全竞争至关重要。最后，国际秩序是当代国际政治的一个不变特征，而有界秩序则不是。只有现实主义的国际秩序才会伴随着有界秩序。

第二个主要区别涉及大国可以组织的不同国际秩序：现实主义、不可知论或意识形态（包括自由主义）。哪种秩序占主导地位主要取决于大国之间的权力分配。关键问题是该体系是两极、多极还是单极。如果是单极，占主导地位的国家的政治意识形态对于确定形成的国际秩序类型也很重要。然而，在两极和多极中，政治意识形态

大国的利益在很大程度上无关紧要。

现实主义秩序
如果体系是两极或多极的，国际秩序及其组成机构将是现实主义的。原因很简单：如果世界上有两个或两个以上的大国，它们别无选择，只能按照现实主义的要求行事，相互进行安全竞争。他们的目标是以牺牲对手为代价获得权力，但如果这不可能，他们要确保权力平衡不会对他们不利。在这种情况下，意识形态考虑服从于安全考虑。即使所有大国都是自由国家，情况也是如此。9 尽管如此，竞争对手大国有时也有合作的动机。毕竟，他们在一个高度相互依存的世界中运作，他们肯定会有一些共同的利益。

在现实主义世界中并肩运作的有界秩序和国际秩序有助于对立的大国在彼此之间竞争和合作。具体而言，大国建立自己的有界秩序，以帮助彼此进行安全竞争。相反，它们组织国际秩序以促进它们之间以及与其他国家之间的合作。构成国际秩序的机构非常适合帮助大国在具有共同利益时达成协议。尽管大国关心合作，但它们仍然是竞争对手，其关系的核心是竞争。即使大国通过国际机构相互合作，权力平衡的考虑也始终在发挥作用。特别是，没有一个大国会签署削弱其权力的协议。

构成这些现实主义秩序的机构——无论是国际的还是有边界的——有时可能具有与自由主义价值观一致的特征，但这并不是该秩序是自由主义的证据。这些特征恰好从权力平衡的角度来看也是有意义的。例如，有边界秩序中的关键经济机构可能旨在促进成员国之间的自由贸易，这并不是因为自由主义的考量，而是因为经济开放被认为是在该秩序内产生经济和军事力量的最佳方式。事实上，如果放弃自由贸易并转向更封闭的经济体系具有良好的战略意义，那么在现实主义秩序中就会发生这种情况。

不可知论和意识形态秩序
如果世界是单极的，国际秩序就不可能是现实主义的。单极只有一个大国，因此从定义上讲，大国之间不可能存在安全竞争，而这是任何现实主义世界秩序的必要条件。因此，唯一的一极几乎没有理由建立一个有界秩序。毕竟，有界秩序主要是为了与其他大国进行安全竞争而设计的，这在单极中是无关紧要的。尽管如此，在非现实主义国际秩序中，一些机构可能在范围上是区域性的，而其他机构在成员方面将是真正的全球性的。然而，这些区域机构都不会捆绑在一起形成有界秩序；相反，它们将与现行国际秩序中的其他机构松散或紧密地联系在一起。

在单极世界，国际秩序可以采取两种形式之一——不可知论或意识形态——这取决于领先国家的政治意识形态。关键问题是单极国家是否具有普遍主义的意识形态，即认为其核心价值观和政治制度应该输出到其他国家。如果单极国家做出这种假设，世界秩序将是意识形态的。换句话说，唯一的一极国家将试图广泛传播其意识形态，并按照自己的形象重塑世界。它将处于有利地位，可以完成这一使命，因为没有竞争对手大国可以与之竞争。

当然，自由主义包含着强大的普遍主义思想，这源于它对个人权利重要性的强调。自由主义的核心是个人主义，它认为每个人都有一套不可剥夺的或自然的权利。因此，自由主义者往往深切关注世界各地人民的权利，无论他们生活在哪个国家。因此，如果单极世界是一个自由民主国家，它几乎肯定会试图建立一个旨在按照自己的形象重塑世界的国际秩序。10

自由国际秩序是什么样的？该体系中的主导国家显然必须是一个自由民主国家，并且必须在构成该秩序的关键机构中拥有巨大影响力。此外，该体系中必须有相当数量的其他自由民主国家，以及一个基本上开放的世界经济。这些自由民主国家，尤其是领先的国家，的最终目标是

其一，是在全球范围内传播民主，同时促进更广泛的经济交流，建立日益强大和有效的国际机构。本质上，其目标是建立一个完全由自由民主国家组成的世界秩序，这些国家在经济上相互联系，并由一套共同的规则约束在一起。其基本假设是，这样的秩序将在很大程度上没有战争，并将为其所有成员国带来繁荣。

共产主义是另一种普世意识形态，可以作为建立意识形态国际秩序的基础。事实上，马克思主义与自由主义有一些重要的相似之处。正如约翰·格雷所说，“两者都是期待普世文明的开明意识形态。”11换句话说，自由主义和共产主义都致力于改变世界。共产主义的普世维度基于阶级概念，而不是权利概念。马克思及其追随者认为，社会阶级超越民族群体和国家边界。最重要的是，他们认为资本主义剥削有助于在不同国家的工人阶级之间建立强大的联系。因此，如果苏联赢得了冷战，并在 1989 年感受到了美国对自由民主的那种对马克思主义的热情，苏联领导人肯定会试图建立共产主义国际秩序。

如果单极国家没有普世意识形态，因此不致力于将其政治价值观和治理体系强加给其他国家，国际秩序将是不可知论的。12 主导大国仍将针对挑战其权威的政权，并仍将深度参与管理构成国际秩序的机构和塑造符合其自身利益的世界经济。然而，它不会致力于塑造全球范围内的地方政治。相反，单极国家在与其他国家打交道时会更加宽容和务实。如果俄罗斯以其现有的政治制度成为单极国家，国际体系将是不可知论的，因为俄罗斯不受普世意识形态的驱动。中国也是如此，其政权的合法性主要来源是民族主义，而不是共产主义。13 这并不是否认共产主义的某些方面对中国统治者仍然具有政治重要性，但北京的领导层几乎没有表现出共产主义通常具有的传教热情。14

厚秩序和薄秩序
到目前为止，我已经区分了国际秩序和有界秩序，并将国际秩序分为现实主义、不可知论和意识形态三种。对秩序（无论是国际秩序还是有界秩序）进行分类的第三种方法是关注它们对国家活动最重要领域的覆盖广度和深度。关于广度，核心问题是秩序是否对其成员国的关键经济和军事活动产生影响。关于深度，主要问题是秩序中的机构是否对其成员国的行为产生重大影响。换句话说，秩序是否具有强大而有效的机构？

考虑到这两个维度，我们可以区分厚秩序和薄秩序。厚秩序或强秩序由对经济和军事领域国家行为产生重大影响的制度组成。这种秩序既广泛又深入。另一方面，薄秩序可以采取三种基本形式。首先，它可能只涉及经济或军事领域，但不会同时涉及这两个领域。即使该领域包含强大的制度，它仍将被归类为薄秩序。其次，秩序可能涉及一个甚至两个领域，但包含弱制度。第三，一种秩序可能涉及经济和军事事务，但只在其中一个领域拥有强大的制度，这是可能的，但可能性不大。简而言之，薄秩序要么不广泛，要么一点也不深入，要么只在两个关键领域中的一个领域深入。图 1 总结了本文采用的不同类别的秩序。

图 1.
秩序类型学
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秩序类型学

国际秩序的兴起和衰落
没有一种国际秩序能够永远存在，这就提出了一个问题：现有秩序的消亡和新秩序的兴起的原因是什么？决定现行秩序的两个因素，即权力分配和主要国家的政治意识形态，也解释了现实主义和不可知论秩序的衰落以及取而代之的秩序类型。虽然这些因素也有助于解释意识形态秩序的瓦解，但另外两个因素，即民族主义和权力平衡政治，通常在导致意识形态秩序崩溃方面发挥着核心作用。

现实主义秩序以两极或多极为基础，当底层权力分配发生变化时，它们就会崩溃。

权力会发生根本性的变化。如果国际体系从两极转向多极或反之，或者多极体系中的大国数量减少或增加，那么所产生的秩序仍然是现实主义的，尽管其结构有所不同。无论体系中的大国数量有多少，它们仍然必须相互竞争权力和影响力。但是，如果两极或多极让位于单极，那么新秩序要么是不可知论的，要么是意识形态的，这取决于唯一一极是否致力于一种普遍主义的意识形态。

现实主义秩序往往具有很强的持久力，因为权力平衡的重大转变通常是大国之间长期经济增长差异的结果。然而，大国战争有时会导致全球权力分配的迅速变化，尽管这种情况很少见。15例如，二战后，体系从多极转向两极，主要是因为德国和日本的彻底失败以及战争给英国和法国带来的惨痛代价。苏联和美国成为两极。此外，当现实主义秩序发生变化时，它们通常会让位于新构建的现实主义秩序——就像二战后发生的那样——仅仅是因为单极世界很少见。

不可知论秩序也往往具有相当大的持久力，因为单极世界接受政治和社会生活中固有的异质性，不会试图微观管理地球上几乎每个国家的政治。这种务实的行为有助于维护甚至增强霸权国家的权力。当单极让位于两极或多极，使该秩序成为现实主义时，不可知论秩序很可能会走向终结；或者如果唯一一极在国内经历一场革命并采用一种普遍主义的意识形态，这肯定会导致它形成一种意识形态秩序。

相比之下，任何以普世意识形态为基础的国际意识形态秩序，如自由主义或共产主义，都注定寿命短暂，这主要是因为当单极国家试图按照自己的形象重塑世界时，国内和全球都会出现困难。民族主义和权力平衡政治会破坏政权更迭目标国家所需的社会工程，而民族主义也会在国内给单极国家及其意识形态盟友带来重大问题。当这些问题出现时，单极国家很可能会放弃按照自己的形象重塑世界，实际上放弃了向国外输出意识形态的努力。它甚至可能完全放弃这种意识形态。当这种情况发生时，秩序就不再是意识形态的，而是不可知论的。

意识形态秩序也可能以第二种方式终结。新的大国可能会出现，这将破坏单极体系，导致两极或多极体系的出现。在这种情况下，意识形态秩序将被有界限的国际现实主义秩序所取代。

冷战秩序，1945-89 年
1945 年至 1989 年，全球权力分配呈现两极化，导致形成了三个主要政治秩序。当时存在一个总体国际秩序，该秩序主要由苏联和美国创建和维持，目的是在双方有共同利益时促进双方合作。尽管强调合作，但它并不是一个自由秩序，因为超级大国在整个冷战期间都处于激烈的竞争中，他们创建的秩序完全符合双方的安全利益。此外，苏联不是一个自由民主国家，莫斯科和华盛顿实际上是意识形态上的对手。还有两个有界限的秩序，一个主要局限于西方，由美国主导，另一个主要由世界共产主义国家组成，由苏联主导。它们是由超级大国为彼此进行安全竞争而创建的。

冷战期间的国际秩序很薄弱，因为它对各国（尤其是大国）在经济或军事领域的行为没有显著影响。由于西方和共产主义世界在冷战期间只进行了极少的经济交流，因此几乎不需要建立机构来帮助管理他们的经济交易。16 然而，在军事上，情况要复杂得多。鉴于美国和苏联是争夺权力的死对头，他们集中精力建立强有力的边界秩序来帮助进行这场斗争。因此，每个超级大国建立的主要军事机构——北约和华沙条约组织——都不是国际性的。相反，它们是美国和苏联主导的边界秩序的关键要素。

然而，美国和苏联

有时候，两国有充分的理由进行合作，并就符合双方共同利益的军备控制协议进行谈判。最重要的是，两国共同制定了旨在防止核扩散的机构。两国还达成了旨在限制军备竞赛的协议，以节省资金、禁止破坏稳定的武器，并避免在南极洲等地区进行竞争。最后，两国达成了旨在建立“道路规则”和建立信任措施的协议。在此过程中，莫斯科和华盛顿帮助加强了冷战时期的国际秩序，尽管这一秩序仍然很薄弱。

两个超级大国在获得原子弹后立即反对进一步扩散。尽管美国在 1945 年试验了第一枚原子弹，苏联在 1949 年也紧随其后，但直到 20 世纪 70 年代中期，两国才建立了一套能够真正限制核武器扩散的机构。第一步是 1957 年国际原子能机构的成立。其主要使命是促进核能的民用，但要采取保障措施，确保接受用于和平目的的核材料和技术的国家不会将其用于制造核弹。超级大国为遏制核扩散而设立的关键机构是《不扩散核武器条约》和核供应国集团，这两个机构与国际原子能机构一起，在 1975 年后显著减缓了核武器的扩散。

美国和苏联也在 20 世纪 60 年代末开始寻求达成军备控制协议，以限制其战略核武库。其结果是 1972 年《战略武器限制条约》（SALT I），该条约限制了双方可以部署的战略核武器数量（尽管数量非常高），并严格限制了反弹道导弹系统的发展。 1979 年，莫斯科和华盛顿签署了《第二阶段战略武器限制条约》，进一步限制了双方的战略核武库，但双方均未批准该条约。20 世纪 80 年代，两个超级大国共同制定了后续协议《削减战略武器条约》，但直到冷战结束后才生效。另一项重要的军备控制协议是 1988 年的《中程核力量条约》，该条约消除了苏联和美国军火库中的所有短程和中程导弹。

两个超级大国还谈判达成了许多其他不太重要的安全协议和条约，这些协议和条约也是冷战国际秩序的一部分。这些协议包括《南极条约体系》（1959 年）、《部分禁止核试验条约》（1963 年）、《莫斯科-华盛顿热线》（1963 年）、《外层空间条约》（1967 年）、《海底军备控制条约》（1971 年）、《美苏海上事故协定》（1972 年）、《欧洲安全与合作会议》（1973 年）、《生物武器公约》（1975 年）和《赫尔辛基协定》（1975 年）。还有一些协议是在冷战期间达成的，例如《联合国海洋法公约》，该公约于 1982 年签署，但直到冷战结束五年后的 1994 年才得到批准和生效。

联合国可能是冷战时期国际秩序中最引人注目的机构，但它对世界各国的行为影响甚微，主要是因为超级大国之间的竞争使得该机构几乎不可能采取和执行相应的政策。

除了这种薄弱的国际秩序之外，超级大国还各自建立了一个有界限的厚秩序来帮助发动冷战。苏联主导的秩序包括处理经济、军事和意识形态问题的机构。17 例如，经济互助委员会 (Comecon) 成立于 1949 年，旨在促进苏联与东欧共产主义国家之间的贸易。华沙条约组织是一个军事联盟，成立于 1955 年，旨在对抗北约，因为北约成员国决定邀请西德加入北约。该公约还帮助莫斯科控制其东欧盟友。最后，苏联于 1947 年成立了共产主义情报局，作为共产国际的继任者。两者旨在协调世界各地共产党的努力，主要目的是让苏联向其意识形态同胞传播其政策观点。共产党信息局于 1956 年解散。

西方有界秩序由美国主导，美国将其塑造为符合其自身利益的秩序。它包括许多经济机构，如国际货币基金组织 (1945 年)、世界银行 (1945 年)、贸易和关税总协定 (GATT，1947 年)、多边出口管制协调委员会 (CoCom，1950 年) 和欧洲共同体 (EC，1950 年)，以及安全方面的北约。尽管自由的美国主导着这一有界秩序，但其中还包括许多其他自由民主国家，

事实上，这是一个自上而下的现实主义秩序。其主要使命是建立一个强大的西方，以遏制并最终击败苏联及其盟友。

尽管强调安全，但创造繁荣本身就是这一有限秩序中各国的重要目标。此外，这一现实主义秩序的某些方面与自由主义原则相兼容。例如，毫无疑问，在其他条件相同的情况下，美国决策者更喜欢与民主国家打交道，而不是与威权国家打交道。但当民主与权力平衡政治的要求相冲突时，推广民主总是会屈服。美国并没有阻止非民主国家加入北约，也没有驱逐那些加入后放弃民主的国家，正如希腊、葡萄牙和土耳其的例子所表明的那样。

此外，尽管华盛顿倾向于支持鼓励该秩序成员国之间自由贸易和投资的经济政策，但这些政策首先受到战略考虑的指导。正如乔安妮·戈瓦 (Joanne Gowa) 所言，“东西方冲突促使美国将安全政治与贸易政治相结合，这一主题在那些定义和发展国际政治经济学分支的学者的著作中反复出现。”18 事实上，德怀特·艾森豪威尔政府普遍认为自由贸易是创造经济和军事实力的最佳方式，但在 20 世纪 50 年代中期，它准备让欧共体成为一个封闭的经济集团——也就是破坏自由贸易——因为它认为这种不自由的安排将使西欧成为冷战中更强大的伙伴。19 此外，马歇尔计划主要是出于战略考虑。正如塞巴斯蒂安·罗萨托 (Sebastian Rosato) 所指出的那样，权力政治支撑了欧盟前身欧共体的建立。20

自由国际秩序，1990-2019
冷战结束、苏联解体后，美国是世界上最强大的国家。 “单极时刻”已经到来，这意味着大国之间安全竞争产生的大多数制约因素都已不复存在。21 此外，美国为应对苏联而建立的厚重西方秩序依然稳固，而苏联秩序则迅速瓦解。1991 年夏天，经互会和华沙条约组织解散，苏联于 1991 年 12 月解体。不出所料，老布什总统决定将现实主义的西方秩序推广到全球，将其转变为自由主义国际秩序。构成冷战时期薄弱国际秩序的机构——联合国和各种军备控制协议——将被纳入布什所谓的“新世界秩序”。22

这一雄心勃勃的努力得到了东亚尤其是西欧自由民主国家的热烈支持，尽管美国占据主导地位这一点从未受到任何怀疑。正如布什在 1990 年所说的那样，“美国的领导地位无可替代。”23 或者正如国务卿马德琳·奥尔布赖特和总统巴拉克·奥巴马喜欢说的那样，美国是“不可或缺的国家”。24 从本质上讲，布什及其白宫继任者一心要创建一个与冷战时期的西方秩序根本不同的新国际秩序。具体来说，他们致力于将有限的现实主义秩序转变为国际自由主义秩序。25 事实上，比尔·克林顿在 1992 年竞选总统时明确表示，其前任的新世界秩序概念不够雄心勃勃。26

创建自由国际秩序涉及三项主要任务。首先，必须扩大组成西方秩序的机构的成员数量，并在必要时建立新机构。换句话说，重要的是建立一个具有普遍成员资格的国际机构网络，对成员国的行为产生巨大影响。其次，必须建立一个开放、包容的国际经济，最大限度地实现自由贸易，促进不受约束的资本市场。这种超全球化的世界经济的范围比冷战期间西方盛行的经济秩序要雄心勃勃得多。第三，必须大力在世界各地传播自由民主，当美国与苏联争夺权力时，这一使命常常被忽视。这一目标并不是美国独有的；它的欧洲盟友也普遍接受了这一承诺。27

当然，这三项任务与主要的自由主义和平理论直接相关：自由制度主义、经济相互依存理论和民主和平理论。因此，在其设计者看来，构建一个强大、可持续的自由主义和平理论

自由国际秩序等同于创造一个和平的世界。这种根深蒂固的信念给了美国及其盟友强大的动力，促使他们努力工作以创造新秩序。将中国和俄罗斯纳入其中对于其成功尤其重要，因为它们是继美国之后体系中最强大的国家。目标是将它们嵌入尽可能多的机构，将它们完全融入开放的国际经济，并帮助它们转变为自由民主国家。

北约向东欧扩张是美国及其盟友努力将受限制的西方秩序转变为自由国际秩序的一个很好的例子。28 人们可能会认为，北约东移是经典威慑战略的一部分，旨在遏制可能具有侵略性的俄罗斯。29 但事实并非如此，因为西方的战略是朝着自由主义目标发展的。目标是将东欧国家——也许有一天俄罗斯也会加入——纳入冷战期间在西欧发展起来的“安全共同体”。没有证据表明，其主要设计者——克林顿、布什和奥巴马总统——认为俄罗斯可能会入侵其邻国，因此需要遏制，或者他们认为俄罗斯领导人有正当理由担心北约扩张。30

克林顿政府向美国和西欧公众兜售这一政策的方式反映了这种对北约扩张的自由主义态度。例如，副国务卿斯特罗布·塔尔博特在 1995 年提出，让东欧国家加入北约——以及欧盟——是实现这一潜在动荡地区稳定的关键。塔尔博特认为，“北约扩张将成为欧洲新民主国家内部和它们之间的法治力量。”此外，它将“促进和巩固民主和自由市场价值观”，这将进一步促进和平。31

美国在后冷战时期对华政策也基于同样的自由主义逻辑。例如，国务卿奥尔布赖特坚持认为，与崛起的中国维持和平关系的关键是与其接触，而不是像冷战期间美国试图对付苏联那样试图遏制它。奥尔布赖特声称，接触将使中国积极加入一些世界主要机构，并帮助中国融入美国主导的经济秩序，这必然有助于中国成为一个自由民主国家。中国将成为国际体系中“负责任的利益相关者”，积极维护与其他国家之间的和平关系。32

布什主义是在 2002 年发展起来的，并被用来为 2003 年 3 月入侵伊拉克辩护，这是美国旨在建立自由国际秩序的重大政策的第三个例子。 2001 年 9 月 11 日恐怖袭击事件发生后，布什政府得出结论，要赢得所谓的全球反恐战争，不仅需要击败基地组织，还需要对抗伊朗、伊拉克和叙利亚等国家。政府的主要操作假设是，这些所谓的流氓国家的政权与基地组织等恐怖组织关系密切，一心想获得核武器，甚至可能将核武器交给恐怖分子。33 政府认为，应对核扩散和恐怖主义的最佳方法是将大中东地区的所有国家变成自由民主国家，这将使该地区成为一个巨大的和平区，从而消除核扩散和恐怖主义这两个双重问题。34 “世界对传播民主价值观有着明确的利益，”布什总统宣称，“因为稳定和自由的国家不会滋生谋杀的意识形态。它们鼓励人们以和平的方式追求更美好的生活。”35

20 世纪 90 年代初，许多观察家认为，美国完全有能力构建自由主义国际秩序。它在冷战期间拥有丰富的建立和运行西方秩序的经验，与潜在竞争对手相比，它非常强大。中国正处于崛起的早期阶段，俄罗斯处于完全混乱的状态，这种情况在整个 20 世纪 90 年代一直如此。这种巨大的权力优势意味着单极国家可以在很大程度上无视现实主义的指令，按照自由主义原则行事，这在冷战期间是不可能的。这也意味着美国可以哄骗或强迫其他国家遵守其法令。当然，华盛顿也有可能使用武力来达到目的。

最后，美国及其盟友在冷战结束后的几年里拥有充分的合法性。他们不仅赢得了那场旷日持久的冲突，而且似乎没有可行的替代方案来取代自由民主，而自由民主似乎是美国的最佳政治秩序

可预见的未来。当时西方普遍认为，世界上几乎每个国家最终都会成为自由民主国家——这一信念让弗朗西斯·福山得出结论，这可能是“历史的终结”。36 此外，在冷战期间帮助西方实现繁荣的众多国际机构似乎非常适合将全球化推向下一步。从本质上讲，美国似乎完全有能力推行自由霸权，这是一种呼吁建立基于自由原则的世界秩序的外交政策。37

在 20 世纪 90 年代和 21 世纪初，美国及其亲密盟友似乎正在建立全面的自由国际秩序。当然也存在问题，但总体而言，新兴秩序运行良好。很少有人预料到，它会在新千年的几年后开始瓦解，但事实就是如此。

黄金时代，1990-2004
冷战结束后，美国及其盟友努力将中国和俄罗斯纳入该秩序的主要经济机构，总体上取得了成功。俄罗斯于 1992 年加入了国际货币基金组织和世界银行，但直到 2012 年才加入世界贸易组织 (WTO)。中国自 1980 年起取代台湾成为国际货币基金组织和世界银行的成员。中国于 2001 年加入世贸组织。尽管 1997 年因台湾问题爆发了小规模危机，但北京和华盛顿在整个 1990 年代和 2000 年代初期一直保持着良好的关系。接触似乎正在发挥作用。莫斯科和华盛顿的关系在此期间也发展良好。

欧洲的情况也不错。 1992 年《马斯特里赫特条约》是推动欧洲一体化的重要一步，1999 年欧元首次亮相，这被广泛视为欧盟前景光明的证据。此外，尽管俄罗斯决策者明确表示反对，但欧盟和北约向东欧扩张的早期浪潮几乎没有出现问题。最后，捷克斯洛伐克和苏联都和平解体。然而，南斯拉夫并没有解体，而是引发了波斯尼亚和科索沃战争，美国及其北约盟友对此反应迟缓，未能结束战争。但最终在 1999 年，巴尔干半岛实现了冷和平。

大中东地区的发展情况更加复杂，但即使在那里，该地区似乎也在缓慢但稳步地融入自由国际秩序。以色列和巴勒斯坦解放组织于 1993 年 9 月签署了《奥斯陆协定》，让人们希望双方能在 2020 年前找到和平解决冲突的办法。 1991 年初，在联合国安理会授权下，美国率领广泛的盟国联盟在伊拉克取得了惊人的军事胜利——解放了科威特，大大削弱了伊拉克的军事实力，并揭露了萨达姆·侯赛因的秘密核武器计划，该计划随后被关闭。尽管如此，复兴社会党政权仍然掌权。阿富汗仍然是一个麻烦地带，主要是因为塔利班允许基地组织在那里策划行动，包括 9 月 11 日的恐怖袭击，而不受干涉。然而，那一天的事件促使美国于 2001 年 10 月入侵阿富汗，推翻了塔利班政权，建立了一个亲西方的政权。然后，在 2003 年 3 月，美国军队征服了伊拉克，推翻了萨达姆的政权。到 2003 年夏天，旨在在整个大中东地区传播民主的布什主义似乎将按预期发挥作用。

冷战结束后，民主显然在前进，这似乎证实了福山的主张，即民主没有可行的替代方案。根据自由之家的数据，1986 年，世界上 34% 的国家是民主国家。到 1996 年，这一数字跃升至 41%，到 2006 年则升至 47%。38 在经济方面，超全球化为全球创造了大量财富，尽管 1997-98 年亚洲发生了重大金融危机。此外，人们对起诉侵犯人权者的兴趣日益浓厚，这促使一位著名学者写了一本名为《正义瀑布：人权起诉如何改变世界政治》的书。39 在核扩散方面，南非于 1989 年放弃了核武器计划，而 1990 年代中期，白俄罗斯、哈萨克斯坦和乌克兰放弃了从苏联继承的核武库并加入了《不扩散核武器条约》。朝鲜在 20 世纪 90 年代初开始研制核武器，1994 年同意终止其核武器计划。

美国及其盟友在 20 世纪 90 年代确实面临一些挫折。印度和巴基斯坦在 1998 年进行了核武器试验；克林顿政府在索马里（1993 年）和海地（1994-95 年）的政策失败；对卢旺达核问题反应太慢

1994 年的种族灭绝。美国也未能结束刚果和苏丹的致命战争，而基地组织在阿富汗境内变得更加危险。尽管如此，人们仍然可以有力地证明，在短时间内，自由国际秩序在全球的传播取得了巨大进展，美国及其盟友最终将能够将非洲和其他陷入困境的国家纳入新秩序，并在遏制核扩散方面取得进一步进展。

自由秩序走下坡路，2005-19 年
21 世纪第一个十年中期，自由国际秩序开始出现严重裂痕，此后裂痕不断扩大。想想大中东地区发生的事情。到 2005 年，伊拉克战争显然正在成为一场灾难，而美国没有停止战斗的策略，更不用说把伊拉克变成一个自由民主国家了。与此同时，阿富汗局势开始恶化，塔利班死而复生，将矛头指向美国扶植的喀布尔政府。随着时间的推移，塔利班势力日益强大，阿富汗战争已成为美国历史上持续时间最长的战争，持续时间比美国内战、第一次世界大战、第二次世界大战和朝鲜战争的总和还要长。此外，美国似乎没有获胜的希望。此外，华盛顿及其盟友在利比亚和叙利亚推行政权更迭，最终导致两国爆发致命内战。此外，在帮助摧毁伊拉克和叙利亚的过程中，布什和奥巴马政府在创建伊拉克和叙利亚伊斯兰国方面发挥了关键作用，美国于 2014 年与其开战。

曾经看似充满希望的奥斯陆和平进程已经失败，巴勒斯坦人几乎没有希望建立自己的国家。在华盛顿的帮助下，以色列领导人反而在建立一个大以色列，正如两位前以色列总理所说，这将是一个种族隔离国家。40 美国还加剧了也门内战的伤亡和破坏，并在 2013 年埃及军方推翻埃及民选政府时表示同意。美国及其盟友非但没有将大中东纳入自由国际秩序，反而在该地区传播非自由混乱方面无意中扮演了核心角色。

欧洲在 20 世纪 90 年代似乎是自由星系中最耀眼的明星，但到 2010 年代末却陷入了严重困境。2005 年，法国和荷兰选民否决了拟议的《建立欧洲宪法条约》，欧盟遭受重大挫折。更具破坏性的是始于 2009 年底并持续至今的欧元区危机。这场危机不仅暴露了欧元的脆弱性，还引发了德国和希腊之间的强烈敌意，以及其他政治问题。41 更糟糕的是，英国于 2016 年 6 月投票退出欧盟，排外右翼政党在整个欧洲势力越来越大。事实上，东欧领导人普遍持有不自由的观点。正如《纽约时报》 2018 年 1 月的一篇文章所说：“捷克总统称穆斯林移民是罪犯。波兰执政党领导人表示，难民中疾病肆虐。匈牙利领导人将移民描述为毒药……[和] 奥地利新任极右翼内政部长建议将移民集中在庇护中心——这显然与二战如出一辙。”42

最后，2014 年乌克兰东部爆发内战，俄罗斯卷入其中，2014 年 3 月俄罗斯从乌克兰手中夺取了克里米亚，导致俄罗斯与西方的关系严重恶化。双方都在东欧扩充军事力量，并定期举行军事演习，加剧了双方之间的猜疑和紧张局势。这场危机主要是由于欧盟和北约扩张，再加上西方国家在格鲁吉亚和乌克兰等国家，甚至可能是俄罗斯本身推行民主而造成的，而且没有迹象表明这场危机很快就会结束。43 鉴于这种情况，莫斯科正在寻找机会挑拨西方关系，削弱欧盟和北约。

跨大西洋关系也出现了裂痕，尤其是特朗普入主白宫后。特朗普对构成自由国际秩序的几乎所有机构都嗤之以鼻，其中包括欧盟和北约。他在 2016 年竞选期间曾称这些机构“已经过时”。44 特朗普上任后不久，在发给欧洲领导人的一封信中，一位欧盟主要政策制定者表示，新总统对欧盟的未来构成了严重威胁。45 几个月后，就在特朗普入主白宫后不久，坚定的大西洋主义者德国总理安格拉·默克尔警告称，欧洲不能依赖特朗普。

她说，欧洲人“真的必须把命运掌握在自己手中”。46 此后，跨大西洋关系只会恶化，在可预见的未来出现转机的可能性似乎很小。

2007-08 年的全球金融危机不仅给许多人的生活造成了巨大损害，而且还使人们对管理自由国际秩序的精英的能力产生了质疑。47 除了俄罗斯与西方关系恶化外，还有令人担忧的迹象表明，美国可能与中国发生冲突，中国决心改变东海、南海、台湾和中印边界的现状。不出所料，美国现在更感兴趣的是遏制中国，而不是与中国接触。事实上，特朗普政府最近表示，让中国加入世贸组织是一个错误，因为北京的保护主义政策清楚地表明，它不愿意遵守该机构的规则。48

最后，自 2006 年以来，自由民主国家的数量一直在下降，扭转了曾经看似不可阻挡的趋势。49 与此相关的是，软威权主义似乎已成为自由民主的一个有吸引力的替代方案，这种发展在 20 世纪 90 年代初几乎是不可想象的。一些领导人颂扬非自由民主的优点，而另一些人则治理着致力于基于根深蒂固的宗教信仰的政治制度的国家。当然，自由民主近年来失去了一些吸引力，特别是因为美国的政治体系往往看起来功能失调。即使是严肃的学者也担心美国民主的未来。50

总之，自由国际秩序正在崩溃。

哪里出了问题？
尽管美国及其盟友在建立自由国际秩序方面取得了早期成功，但这一秩序也蕴含着自身毁灭的种子。即使西方决策者能够更明智地管理这一秩序，他们也无法以任何有意义的方式延长其寿命。它注定会失败，因为它包含三个致命缺陷。

首先，干预各国政治以将其转变为自由民主国家极其困难，在全球范围内尝试如此雄心勃勃的社会工程几乎肯定会适得其反，并破坏这一事业本身的合法性。民族主义几乎肯定会在政权更迭目标国家内部引起强烈抵制。权力平衡政治也将有助于在特定情况下阻碍这一事业。担心政权更迭（或美国其他形式的干涉）的国家将联合起来相互支持，并寻求挫败美国自由主义议程的方法。因此，叙利亚和伊朗在 2003 年美国入侵伊拉克后协助了伊拉克叛乱，俄罗斯和中国在经济、军事以及联合国安理会等国际论坛上相互支持。

其次，自由国际秩序最终创造了导致自由民主国家内部出现严重政治问题的条件，这些问题涉及主权和民族认同，当政权更迭的努力失败并导致大规模难民涌入自由国家时，情况就更是如此。同样，问题的主要原因是民族主义，即使在自称自由的社会中，民族主义也远未消亡。

第三，超全球化给自由民主国家（包括唯一极点）的大量民众带来了巨大的经济成本。这些成本包括失业、工资下降或停滞以及明显的收入不平等，对国内政治产生了严重影响，进一步破坏了自由国际秩序。此外，开放的国际经济助长了中国的崛起，而中国和俄罗斯的复兴最终削弱了单极世界，而单极世界是建立自由国际秩序的必要条件。

推广民主的危险

建立自由国际秩序最重要的要求是广泛传播自由民主，这最初被视为一项完全可行的任务。西方普遍认为，政治已经发展到没有其他合理替代自由民主的地步。如果是这样，那么建立自由国际秩序就相对容易了，因为在世界各地传播自由民主几乎不会遇到阻力。事实上，大多数人都欢迎生活在西方式民主中的想法，就像共产主义垮台后东欧的情况一样。

然而，这项努力从一开始就注定要失败。首先，对于什么是理想的政治制度，从来没有、也永远不会有普遍的共识。有人可能会说自由民主是最好的政府形式（我会这样认为），但其他人总是会倾向于不同的治理体系。值得记住的是，在 20 世纪 30 年代，许多人

欧洲人更喜欢共产主义或法西斯主义，而不是自由民主。人们可能会指出，自由民主最终战胜了这两种“主义”。尽管这是事实，但 20 世纪 30 年代的历史提醒我们，自由民主并不是命中注定的秩序，精英及其公众选择替代政治制度并不罕见。因此，东欧出现非自由民主国家，而中国和俄罗斯则实行独裁统治，朝鲜是独裁政权，伊朗是伊斯兰共和国，以色列越来越重视其犹太身份而非民主特征，这并不奇怪。51 世界上从未有过超过 50% 的国家是自由民主国家，这也不足为奇。52

关于什么是最好的治理制度的这种观点的多样性与民族主义相结合，使得在世界各地传播自由民主的过程变得极其困难。毕竟，民族主义是一种非常强大的政治力量，它非常重视自决和主权。换言之，民族国家不希望其他民族国家告诉它们应该如何安排自己的政治制度。因此，试图将自由民主强加给一个倾向于另一种政府形式的国家几乎肯定会引起激烈的抵抗。

对抗必败之战

试图建立自由国际秩序必然会导致与旨在将这些目标转变为自由民主国家的次要国家的战争。在两极或多极体系中，大国可以尝试的此类社会工程的程度受到很大限制，主要是因为它们必须专注于相互竞争权力和影响力。传播自由民主是次要的，甚至第三重要的；事实上，有时自由国家会寻求支持威权政府，如果它们与竞争对手大国结盟，就像美国在冷战期间多次做的那样。

然而，在单极世界中，唯一的一极可以自由地开展十字军东征，使世界更加民主，仅仅是因为没有竞争对手大国需要担心。因此，毫不奇怪的是，自冷战结束以来，美国打了七场战争，并且在此期间每三年就有两年处于战争状态。53 然而，这样的战争往往无法实现其目标。

美国使用军事力量实现民主的努力主要集中在大中东地区，但却一次又一次地失败。54 美国军队入侵阿富汗（2001 年）和伊拉克（2003 年），意图将其变成自由民主国家。占领军不仅没有实现这一目标，而且还引发了血腥战争，给这两个国家的政治和社会生活造成了巨大的破坏。造成这种惨淡记录的主要原因是，在任何社会进行大规模的社会工程都是困难的，但在政治领导层刚刚被推翻的外国，这尤其令人生畏。目标国将陷入混乱；入侵部队将与一种甚至可能对自由民主怀有敌意的外来文化打交道；最重要的是，民族主义情绪必将急剧上升，并引发反抗占领者的叛乱，正如美国在阿富汗和伊拉克所发现的那样。

尽管这些失败削弱了公众对自由国际秩序的支持，并对其领导人的能力产生了怀疑，但它们并没有阻止这个唯一的极地试图通过军事手段传播自由民主，这进一步扩大了自身的范围。55 相反，它寻找成本更低的方法来完成这项任务，这实际上意味着放弃征服和占领非民主国家，采用不同的策略来推翻独裁领导人。因此，当 2011 年利比亚敌对派系爆发战斗时，美国及其欧洲盟友动用空中力量帮助穆阿迈尔·卡扎菲上校下台。但西方大国无论有没有地面部队，都无法将利比亚变成一个正常运转的国家，更不用说一个自由民主国家了。

同样在 2011 年，美国及其中东盟友试图通过武装和训练反对他的叛乱组织来推翻叙利亚总统巴沙尔·阿萨德。然而，这一努力失败了，主要是因为与叙利亚有着长期战略关系的俄罗斯于 2015 年进行干预，以维持阿萨德的权力。现实政治挫败了美国在叙利亚的努力。但即使阿萨德被罢免，最终结果要么是冲突的延续，就像在利比亚一样，要么是另一个残酷独裁者的上台，就像埃及总统胡斯尼·穆巴拉克于 2011 年初被罢免后最终发生的那样。叙利亚的自由民主不太可能实现，但丰富的

谋杀和混乱。

将主要大国变成敌人
最后，建立自由国际秩序的努力所依赖的十字军心态导致单极国家与体系中任何非自由民主的大国之间的关系恶化。尽管占主导地位的国家会强烈倾向于对小国发动战争以促进自由民主，但它很少会为此目的攻击大国，尤其是当它们拥有核武器时。56 成本太高，成功的可能性尤其低。因此，后冷战时期的美国政策制定者从未认真考虑入侵中国或俄罗斯，尽管美国比这两个国家都强大得多。

尽管如此，美国一直致力于将中国和俄罗斯变成自由民主国家，并将它们纳入美国主导的自由世界秩序。美国领导人不仅明确表明了他们的意图，而且还依靠非政府组织和各种微妙的策略推动北京和莫斯科接受自由民主。实际上，他们的目标是和平的政权更迭。可以预见的是，中国和俄罗斯抵制单极国家的努力，其原因与小国反对美国影响其国内政治的努力相同，事实上，也是美国人现在对俄罗斯干涉其国家政治的想法感到畏惧的原因。在一个民族主义是最强大的政治意识形态的世界里，自决和主权对所有国家都至关重要。

中国和俄罗斯也出于现实主义的原因抵制自由秩序的传播，因为这将使美国在经济、军事和政治上主宰国际体系。例如，北京和莫斯科都不希望美国军队驻扎在其周边地区，更不用说在其边境了。因此，中国谈论将美国军队赶出西太平洋，而俄罗斯长期以来强烈反对欧盟和北约向东欧扩张，这并不令人惊讶。事实上，将这些机构移向俄罗斯最终导致了 2014 年的乌克兰危机。这场持续的冲突不仅毒害了俄罗斯与西方的关系，而且激励莫斯科寻找削弱欧盟和北约的方法。简而言之，民族主义和现实主义的考量导致单极世界的两个大国对单极世界建立强大的自由国际秩序的努力提出异议。

让自由民主国家反对自由秩序
建立强大的自由国际秩序最终会导致自由民主国家内部出现严重的政治问题，因为伴随的政策与民族主义相冲突。国内的这些问题以两种形式出现，最终会破坏秩序本身。

首先，自由国家坚信国际机构的优点，这导致它们将越来越多的权力委托给构成秩序的机构。然而，这一策略被广泛视为这些国家放弃主权的证据。人们可以争论这些自由国家是否真的放弃了主权，但毫无疑问，它们正在将一些重要决策的权力委托给这些机构，这很可能给现代民族国家带来严重的政治麻烦。57 毕竟，民族主义强调自决和主权，因此它与制定对其成员国产生决定性影响的政策的国际机构存在根本冲突。58 Jeff Colgan 和 Robert Keohane 写道：“这种国际权力扩张的累积效应是过度限制主权，让人们觉得外国势力在控制他们的生活。”59

这个问题的严重程度将取决于相关机构对其成员国拥有多大的权力和影响力。当然，构成自由世界秩序的机构旨在对其成员国的行为产生深远影响。这种制度影响不可避免地引发了对“民主赤字”的担忧。这些国家的选民开始认为，那些为他们做出重大决定的遥远的官僚是不可接近和不负责任的。

有明显证据表明，这种现象在整个欧洲都存在。60 以 2016 年支持英国脱欧的投票为例。鉴于欧盟对其成员国政策的巨大影响，大多数英国公民投票支持英国脱欧的主要原因之一是他们认为他们的国家向布鲁塞尔移交了太多权力，是时候重申英国主权了，这并不奇怪。特别是，许多英国人认为英国已经失去了对其经济政策的控制，这正在破坏民主的公平。

不稳定。61 布鲁塞尔的欧盟官僚并非由英国人选举产生，他们被视为英国经济政策和其他政策的主要制定者。因此，一项关于英国脱欧的重要研究的作者写道：“重新获得主权——夺回控制权——是 2016 年公投的主要主题。”62

西方对放弃主权的担忧并不仅限于欧盟。正如罗伯特·库特纳 (Robert Kuttner) 指出的那样，随着 20 世纪 90 年代超全球化的蓬勃发展，国际货币基金组织和世界银行“变成了布雷顿森林体系所想象的角色的对立面。它们成为执行古典自由放任主义作为普遍治理原则的工具。”63 不出所料，对主权的担忧在最近的美国政治中发挥了重要作用。尤其是特朗普在竞选总统时，强调“美国优先”，他严厉批评了构成自由国际秩序的所有关键机构，包括欧盟、国际货币基金组织和世界银行。64

自由国际秩序还采取了与国家认同相冲突的政策，这对世界各地的人们，包括美国和西欧的人们来说都非常重要。65 自由主义的核心是一种个人主义意识形态，它非常重视不可剥夺的权利的概念。这种信念认为地球上的每个人都拥有相同的基本权利，这是自由主义普遍主义维度的基础。这种普遍主义或跨国观点与民族主义的深刻特殊主义形成鲜明对比，民族主义建立在世界被划分为独立国家、每个国家都有自己文化的信念之上。保护文化的最好方式是拥有自己的国家，这样民族才能在“他者”的威胁面前生存下来。66

鉴于自由主义强调个人享有平等权利，加上其淡化甚至忽视民族认同的倾向，自由国际秩序强调各国应该理所当然地接受寻求庇护的难民，个人在因经济或其他原因从一个民族国家转移到另一个民族国家时应该很少遇到障碍，这并不奇怪。这一政策的典型例子是欧盟的申根协议，该协议在很大程度上消除了该机构大多数成员国之间的边界。此外，欧盟原则上坚定地致力于向逃离麻烦地区的难民敞开大门。

在一个民族认同非常重要的世界里，将不同的民族混合在一起（当有开放的边界和宽容的难民政策时就会发生这种情况）通常会导致严重的麻烦。例如，移民似乎是英国选民支持英国脱欧的主要原因。他们尤其不满东欧人利用欧盟的开放边境政策轻易移民到英国。67 英国在这方面也不例外，因为反移民情绪在欧洲普遍存在，并加剧了人们对欧盟的敌意。68 2015 年开始抵达欧洲的大批中东难民显然没有受到自由国际秩序中心国家所期望的那种欢迎。事实上，人们强烈反对接受这些难民，尤其是在东欧，在德国也是如此，德国总理默克尔最初欢迎这些难民，这在政治上伤害了自己。开放边境和难民的麻烦不仅使人们对欧盟对自由价值观的承诺产生了质疑，而且还在成员国之间造成了分歧——这些分歧动摇了这个古老机构的基础。

超全球化的弊端
自由国际秩序建立后，经济交流急剧增长，导致该体系中的自由国家内部出现重大经济问题。这些问题反过来又引发了对这一秩序的强烈政治抵制。当这种情况发生在民主国家时，公众很可能会反对自由主义精英，选出支持与自由主义原则相悖的政策的领导人。

当代国际经济高度一体化，极具活力。变化以超光速发生，一个国家的重大发展必然会对其他国家产生重大影响。这种完全开放的体系带来了相当大的好处。它在全球范围内带来了令人印象深刻的增长，帮助中国和印度等国家数百万人摆脱了贫困，并为世界上最富有的人带来了巨大的经济利益。与此同时，它也造成了政府无力解决的重大问题，至少如果它们按照自由世界秩序的规则行事的话。理解这一现象的最好方法是将当今的超全球化与温和的全球化进行比较。

1945 年至 20 世纪 80 年代末，布雷顿森林共识下取得了成功。69

布雷顿森林共识旨在促进开放的国际经济，但仅限于一定程度。70 例如，跨国资本流动受到重大限制。尽管关贸总协定旨在促进国际贸易，但各国政府在符合自身利益的情况下，有相当大的回旋余地采取保护主义政策。实际上，各国政府能够推行不仅促进繁荣，而且保护其公民免受市场波动影响的政策。约翰·鲁吉将市场与政府之间的这种关系称为“嵌入式自由主义”。71 布雷顿森林共识在四十多年的时间里运行良好，尽管到 20 世纪 80 年代末，它的日子已经屈指可数了。

超全球化在 20 世纪 80 年代开始受到关注，并在冷战后加速发展，有效地推翻了布雷顿森林共识。新秩序主要由西方政策制定者创建，旨在通过取消对资本流动的控制并用世界贸易组织取代关贸总协定，大大减少对全球市场的监管。这个新的贸易组织于 1995 年开始运作，旨在开放全球市场，使各国政府推行保护主义政策变得尤为困难。正如丹尼·罗德里克所说，“任何阻碍自由贸易的障碍都被视为应被消除的可憎之物；警告一概不予理睬。”72 从本质上讲，几乎任何形式的政府对世界经济运作的干预都被认为对自由国际秩序有害。再次引用罗德里克的话：“国家从经济增长的帮手变成了阻碍经济增长的主要障碍。”73

超全球化及其不满

超全球化造成了许多重大经济问题，这些问题削弱了自由世界秩序在构成该系统核心的国家中的合法性。首先，外包导致一个国家经济特定领域的许多工作岗位迅速消失，大量人员失业。74 有时整个地区的传统经济基础都会被摧毁。失业者往往很难找到高薪工作，甚至根本找不到工作，其中许多人都是流动性很低的非技术工人。75 即使他们找到了好工作，也有可能再次失去工作，因为超全球化会带来“创造性破坏”。即使是那些还没有失业的人也担心有一天自己会失业。简而言之，世界经济固有的活力不仅威胁着就业，而且还在世界各地的人们心中滋生了强烈的未来不确定性。

此外，超全球化对提高自由西方中下层阶级的实际收入水平几乎没有起到什么作用。与此同时，它还大大增加了上层阶级的工资和财富。76 其结果是，几乎所有地方都出现了惊人的经济不平等，而且几乎没有任何缓解的迹象。77 事实上，这个问题似乎还会越来越严重。78 根据布雷顿森林共识，政府可以通过制定再分配税收政策、工人培训计划和慷慨的福利待遇来很好地处理这类问题。但在自由国际秩序中，几乎所有问题的解决方案都是让市场来处理，而不是让政府来处理，因为政府被认为是使全球经济平稳运行的负担，而不是资产。如果全球经济需要制定规则来促进平稳运行，那么最好依靠国际机构而不是政府。

当然，市场无法解决这些问题；事实上，它们首先导致了这些问题，而且如果国家没有制定保护公民的政策，它们很可能会使这些问题变得更糟。正如人们所料，这些不断恶化的问题导致人们对自由国际秩序普遍不满，并促使各国政府采取保护主义经济政策，从而破坏现有体系。特朗普在 2016 年总统竞选中利用了这种对现有秩序的敌意，不仅抨击国际机构，还为推行保护主义经济政策辩护。他强调保护美国工人的重要性高于一切。在共和党初选和大选中，他击败了捍卫自由国际秩序、反对保护主义的对手。79 自就任总统以来，特朗普一直朝着明显的保护主义方向发展。最终，当市场与一个国家大量公民的深层利益发生冲突时，该国的政治将以破坏自由国际秩序的方式发展。

特朗普的政策还带来了另一个重大问题

超全球化。资本跨境流动的便捷性和速度，加上自由主义世界秩序强调放松政府管制，使得该秩序容易引发特定国家或地区，甚至整个世界的大规模经济危机。卡门·莱因哈特 (Carmen Reinhart) 和肯尼斯·罗戈夫 (Kenneth Rogoff) 写道：“国际资本高度流动的时期，曾多次引发国际银行业危机。”80 事实上，自 20 世纪 80 年代末超全球化开始扎根以来，已经发生了许多危机。81 最严重的是 1997-98 年的亚洲金融危机，这场危机险些蔓延至全球，以及 2007-08 年的全球金融危机，这是自 20 世纪 30 年代大萧条以来最严重的经济崩溃，在很大程度上使西方的自由国际秩序失去了合法性。82 鉴于资本的持续流动性，可能会发生更多此类危机，进一步削弱现有秩序，甚至可能导致其崩溃。

有必要就欧元说几句，欧元是自由国际秩序的一个关键特征，尽管它严格意义上属于欧洲机构。83 1999 年欧元成立时，它代表着在促进成员国货币联盟方面迈出了一大步，尽管当时没有财政联盟或政治联盟来支撑欧元。当时的批评者预测，如果没有财政和政治联盟，欧元最终将受到严重问题的困扰。84 许多支持者认识到了这个问题，但认为货币联盟最终将导致三个方面的联盟，从而消除问题。但这并没有发生，欧元在 2009 年遭遇了第一次重大危机，不仅产生了经济问题，还产生了政治问题。这场危机以及随后的解决尝试使欧洲的民族主义情绪浮出水面。

欧盟在应对欧元区危机方面遇到了很大困难，但问题最终通过欧洲中央银行和美国政府等机构的大规模救助得到解决，尽管此前欧盟受到了重大的政治损害。但更重要的是，欧盟尚未在财政和政治联盟方面取得重大进展，这意味着这一解决方案只是暂时的，未来几年可能会出现更多危机，这将进一步破坏欧盟乃至整个自由国际秩序。

中国的崛起
超全球化还存在一个问题，与自由国家日益增长的对国际秩序的政治反对无关，而是与全球力量平衡息息相关。在 2017 年特朗普上台之前，西方精英们秉承着冷战后与中国接触而非遏制中国的政策，坚定地致力于将中国融入世界经济，包括其所有主要经济机构。他们认为，一个日益繁荣富裕的中国最终将成为一个自由民主国家和自由国际秩序的杰出成员。

然而，该政策的设计者没有意识到，通过帮助加速中国的增长，他们实际上是在帮助破坏自由秩序，因为中国已经迅速成长为一个拥有强大军事实力的经济强国。实际上，它们帮助中国成为一个大国，从而削弱了单极体系，而单极体系对于维持自由世界秩序至关重要。俄罗斯的复兴加剧了这一问题，俄罗斯虽然显然很弱，但再次成为一个大国。随着中国崛起和俄罗斯卷土重来，国际体系已经变得多极化，这对自由国际秩序来说是一个丧钟。更糟糕的是，中国和俄罗斯都没有成为自由民主国家。

即使中国和俄罗斯没有成为大国，世界仍然是单极的，自由秩序今天仍会因其内在缺陷而分崩离析。唐纳德·特朗普在总统竞选期间尖锐而频繁地批评后冷战秩序的所有关键要素，他的当选证明了到 2016 年时自由世界秩序已经陷入了多大的困境。因此，如果国际体系仍然是单极的，那么在特朗普总统的领导下，自由世界秩序将演变为不可知论秩序，因为现实主义秩序在单极体系中没有立足之地。当然，没有证据表明他致力于重塑现有的自由主义秩序。事实上，他似乎一心要破坏它。无论有没有中国，自由主义国际秩序注定会失败，因为它在诞生之初就存在致命缺陷。

摘要
上述各种因果过程都在颠覆自由主义国际秩序方面发挥了重要作用。虽然每个过程都有不同的逻辑，但它们往往协同作用

例如，超全球化对中下层阶级的负面影响，加上民族主义者对移民的不满和失去主权的感觉，激起了民粹主义者对自由秩序原则和实践的强烈反对。事实上，这种愤怒往往针对从该秩序中受益并极力捍卫它的自由主义精英。当然，这种不满情绪产生了重大的政治后果。它在美国和其他西方民主国家造成了深刻的政治分歧，导致了英国脱欧，帮助特朗普入主白宫，并助长了世界各地对民族主义领导人的支持。

我们走向何方？
人们可能会承认自由国际秩序正处于衰落的末期，但有人认为可以用一种更务实的版本取而代之，这种版本可以避免后冷战秩序的过度行为。85 这种更温和的自由秩序将采取一种更微妙、更温和的方式来传播自由民主，遏制超全球化，并对国际机构的权力施加一些重大限制。根据这一观点，新秩序将类似于冷战时期的西方秩序，尽管它将是全球性的和自由的，而不是有限制的和现实主义的。

然而，这种解决方案并不可行，因为单极时代已经结束，这意味着在可预见的未来，任何形式的自由国际秩序都不可能维持。此外，特朗普总统无意追求“自由主义”世界秩序，没有他的支持，这一选择就不可能实现。但即使特朗普不是障碍，国际体系仍是单极的，如果美国降低目标，试图建立一个不那么雄心勃勃的自由主义秩序，它也会失败。事实上，它最终会建立一个不可知论的国际秩序。

用温和或更被动的政策不可能建立一个有意义的自由主义全球秩序。这项事业需要在太多地方进行太多的社会工程。如果自由单极国家及其盟友有任何成功的机会（我认为没有），他们必须坚持不懈地推行雄心勃勃的全球政策，这就是美国及其自由主义伙伴在冷战后采取这种行动的原因。然而，由于过去的失败，这种方法现在在政治上不可行。因此，自由民主国家别无选择，只能采取小步骤，按照自己的形象重塑世界，同时对世界上大多数国家采取宽容的态度。这种谦逊的态度将有效地产生一种不可知论的秩序。但这不会发生，因为这个体系是多极的，大国政治再次发挥作用。因此，关键问题是：什么样的现实主义秩序将主导新多极世界的格局？

新的现实主义秩序
在可预见的未来，可能会有三种不同的现实主义秩序：一个薄弱的国际秩序和两个有界限的厚秩序——一个由中国领导，另一个由美国领导。新兴的薄弱国际秩序将主要关注监督军备控制协议和使全球经济有效运转。它还可能比过去更加关注与气候变化有关的问题。从本质上讲，构成国际秩序的机构将专注于促进国家间合作。相比之下，两个有界秩序将主要关注彼此之间的安全竞争，尽管这需要促进每个秩序成员之间的合作。这两个秩序之间将存在需要管理的重大经济和军事竞争，这就是为什么它们将是厚秩序的原因。

新多极世界的两个关键特征将深刻影响新兴秩序。首先，假设中国继续其令人瞩目的崛起，它将与美国展开激烈的安全竞争，这将成为 21 世纪国际政治的核心特征。这种竞争将导致由中国和美国主导的有界秩序的产生。军事联盟将是这两个秩序的核心组成部分，这两个秩序现在开始形成，将类似于冷战时期苏联和美国主导的秩序。

然而，北京和华盛顿有时会有理由在某些军事问题上进行合作，这一努力将属于国际秩序的范畴，就像冷战期间一样。同样，重点将主要放在军备控制协议上，将涉及俄罗斯、中国和美国。现有的处理扩散问题的条约和协议可能会继续存在，因为三个大国都希望限制核武器的扩散。但北京

俄罗斯、莫斯科和华盛顿将不得不谈判新的条约来限制各自的军备，就像冷战期间的超级大国所做的那样。86 尽管如此，美国和中国主导的有限秩序将主要负责处理核心安全问题。

在军事问题上，围绕中美竞争建立的三个新兴秩序应该与冷战时期的三个秩序有明显的相似之处，尽管中国取代了苏联。

然而，在经济领域并不存在这样的相似之处。在冷战的大部分时间里，超级大国或各自的秩序之间几乎没有经济交流。因此，现有的国际秩序并没有以任何有意义的方式关注促进双方的经济关系。经济交往主要局限于有限秩序，其主要目标是推行有助于获得优势的政策。由于经济实力是军事实力的基础，因此安全竞争在经济和军事领域都进行了。

经济合作与竞争
如今，经济形势与冷战时期大不相同，这导致了新多极化的第二个重要特征，它将塑造新兴的秩序。中国和美国之间以及中国和美国在东亚的盟友之间有着大量的经济交流。中国和美国还在世界各地进行贸易和投资。两个有界秩序之间的安全竞争不太可能显著减少这些经济流动。87 持续贸易带来的收益太大了。即使美国试图限制与中国的贸易，北京也可以通过增加与其他伙伴（如欧洲）的贸易来弥补。换句话说，未来的欧洲很可能类似于第一次世界大战前的欧洲，当时三国同盟（奥匈帝国、德国和意大利）和三国协约国（英国、法国和俄罗斯）之间存在激烈的安全竞争，但这六个国家之间以及整个欧洲内部的经济互动非常多。

由于世界经济仍将高度相互依存，新兴国际秩序将在管理全球各国之间的经济关系中发挥关键作用。尽管中国在帮助该秩序促进经济合作方面有着深厚的利益，但它将利用其日益增长的实力重塑新的国际秩序，使其对自己有利。它将寻求改写该秩序现有经济机构的规则，以赋予其更大的影响力，并将创建反映其日益增长的实力的新机构。88 后一种方法的一个突出例子是北京于 2015 年成立亚洲基础设施投资银行，一些观察家认为该银行是国际货币基金组织和世界银行的潜在竞争对手。当然，这种情况与苏联在冷战期间的表现有着根本的不同。

然而，这并不是经济故事的结束，因为在全球层面持续经济合作的大背景下，两个有界秩序之间肯定会存在激烈的经济竞争。89 这种竞争在很大程度上将受到安全问题的驱动。毕竟，经济实力是军事实力的基础，这意味着中国有强大的战略动机去占据世界主导地位，而这正是它的目标。例如，“中国制造2025”就是北京的一项计划，旨在主导全球各种高科技产品的市场。中国的策略是向国有企业提供大量政府补贴，并用从美国和其他西方公司窃取的技术补充其研究。”90 中国还利用其不断增长的经济实力，迫使其东亚邻国站在北京一边，反对华盛顿。91

当然，美国将反击中国，这不仅是出于安全原因，也是因为美国商界不想输给中国。92 特朗普政府对华严厉的经济政策只是美国主导和中国主导的秩序之间长期激烈竞争的开始。93 例如，美国肯定会试图限制向中国转让两用技术——可用于军事目的的先进民用技术。它还将试图管理与中国及其盟友的贸易和投资，以不削弱他们在权力平衡中的地位，并希望改善这种地位。

这两个正在形成的有界秩序将包括旨在促进成员国之间经济合作的机构，同时寻求获得相对于对手秩序的经济优势。例如，奥巴马政府明确设计了跨太平洋伙伴关系协定，目的是

其宗旨，尽管特朗普就任总统后放弃了这一宗旨。中国于 2013 年发起了雄心勃勃的“一带一路”计划，其目的不仅是帮助中国维持其惊人的经济增长，而且还要向全球展示中国的军事和政治实力。由于美国拒绝加入亚洲基础设施开发银行，这个令人印象深刻的机构很可能成为中国主导的有限秩序的核心部分。

简而言之，中国主导的有限秩序和美国主导的有限秩序之间的竞争将涉及全面的经济和军事竞争，就像冷战期间莫斯科和华盛顿主导的有限秩序一样。94 这次最大的不同是，国际秩序将深入参与管理全球经济的合作方面，而冷战期间并非如此。95

俄罗斯和欧洲
俄罗斯呢？它当然是一个大国，这就是为什么新兴世界是多极的，而不是两极的。但在可预见的未来，俄罗斯将是三大国中最弱的一个，除非美国或中国经济遭遇重大的长期问题。关于俄罗斯的关键问题是：在中美竞争中，俄罗斯会站在哪一??边？尽管俄罗斯现在与中国结盟，但随着时间的推移，它很可能会改变立场，与美国结盟，因为鉴于两国地理位置接近，日益强大的中国对俄罗斯的威胁更大。如果莫斯科和华盛顿因为共同惧怕中国而建立更紧密的关系，俄罗斯将松散地融入美国主导的有界秩序。如果莫斯科继续与北京保持友好关系，因为它更惧怕美国而不是中国，俄罗斯将松散地融入中国主导的有界秩序。俄罗斯可能会试图不与任何一方结盟，保持旁观。96

最后，欧洲呢？欧洲大多数国家，尤其是主要大国，都可能成为美国主导的有限秩序的一部分，尽管它们不太可能在遏制中国方面发挥重大军事作用。它们没有能力向东亚投射大规模军事力量，也没有理由获得这种力量，因为中国并不直接威胁欧洲，而且欧洲将责任推给美国及其亚洲盟友更有意义。然而，美国政策制定者出于战略相关的经济原因，希望欧洲国家加入其有限秩序。特别是，美国希望阻止欧洲国家向中国出售军民两用技术，并在必要时帮助对北京施加经济压力。作为回报，美国军队将留在欧洲，保持北约的存在，并继续充当该地区的抚慰者。鉴于几乎每位欧洲领导人都希望看到这种情况发生，退出的威胁应该会给美国带来重大筹码，使欧洲国家在经济方面与中国合作。

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.