They Say Trump Is Destroying The World Order — What World Order?

-Essay-

BUENOS AIRES — There has been much talk recently of the crisis of the liberal international order that emerged after World War II. After its consolidation and even a brief apogee following the Cold War, which ended in 1991, it is now said that the administration of U.S. President Donald J. Trump is pushing that regime toward a terminal crisis.

In truth, the so-called “liberal international order” was neither very orderly nor very liberal, nor even very international, even during the Cold War. To call the Cold War orderly merely for the absence of a direct conventional war between the superpowers is to underestimate how close the world came to nuclear war at least twice (the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and the Soviet false alarm incident of1983). It is also to forget the numerous, violent conflicts happening on the world’s periphery in that period, from Asia to the Middle East and Latin America. 

Nor was the post-War order particularly liberal. In our region, for example, Latin Americans suffered the terrible consequences of the various “friendly” dictatorships backed by the United States. The liberal values of democracy and human rights were not necessarily a priority outside the North Atlantic area, which is why it is so difficult to term these arrangements as a liberal international order. Ultimately, the ‘order’ and the ‘liberal’ applied to a fairly limited area of the world.

Unipolar imbalance

With the end of the Cold War, realism in International Relations spoke of the “unipolar moment.” For the realists, unipolarity cannot last long because international politics is a system always tending toward a balance of power, and a unipolar world is not balanced. 

At the end of the Cold War, the “triumph” of the liberal order rested on three pillars: free trade and globalization, democracy and multilateralism. Yet almost immediately, big problems arose with all three. To begin with, in 1999 we saw the first massive anti-globalization protests in Seattle, at a meeting of the World Trade Organization. 

In the exact place where the West had arrived to bring democracy, war crimes were documented for all to see.

As of 2003, allegations emerged in Iraq of human rights violations committed by U.S. soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison and British soldiers in Basra. In the exact place where the West had arrived to bring democracy and human rights, horrifying torture, physical, psychological and sexual abuse, rape, murder, and other war crimes were documented for all to see.

Finally, the principle of multilateralism was frequently ignored, especially after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Indeed the United Nations, the multilateral body par excellence, declared that the invasion of Iraq by the United States and a coalition of allies was an illegal act.

That declaration of illegality earned the UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali a U.S. veto over his reappointment in office, this being a clearly unilateral act. That year, U.S. President George W. Bush withdrew the United States from the Kyoto (climate) Protocol and, in 2002, from the Rome Statute, the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court.

Even before, between 1993 and 1999, the U.S. imposed or threatened to impose unilateral economic sanctions 60 times on 35 countries, pressuring its allies to do the same, while bypassing the UN.

Final blow

In short, the crisis of the Western model based on interdependence, democracy and multilateralism, is longstanding. That said, the second Trump administration certainly seems to be dealing the final blow to international liberalism, even if this is more a case of Chronicle of a Death Foretold than sudden demise.

To this lengthy crisis we can add a multitude of challenges to the liberal order: Chinese expansion, Russian revisionism, the rise of countries of the Global South dissatisfied with the Western order, and the frustration of significant sectors of society in core countries, which explains the success of populist and illiberal leaders.

The challenges to the international order are now coming from both outside and within.

The novelty in this period is that all of what Trump brings — his ideas and style, his nationalism and foreign policy — means that the challenges to the international order are now coming from both outside and within.

We could imagine a future U.S. administration reversing trade and industrial protectionism and reviving a more supportive foreign policy, for example by restoring aid funds and international programs. It could rejoin the international pacts from which this administration withdrew or those it defunded, like WHO and environmental treaties. It may even try to regain international hegemony.

How to rebuild?

But there’s something any future new administration will have a harder time rebuilding: the trust of former allies and friends who view the change of course as a betrayal.

After World War II, the United States led other countries in an ambitious and far-reaching commitment. With Western European countries, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Taiwan, the United States strengthened a community of shared values, compatible political ideals, international institutions and mutual support within those institutions. It offered security guarantees and even nuclear safeguards during the Cold War and post-Cold War, as well as open and integrated economic and trade models.

This allowed mutual trust and visions of a shared future to grow among partners and allies. In recent months, the Trump administration has sharply eroded the country’s credibility with these friends. And credibility and trust are much more easily destroyed than built.. never mind rebuilt.

*Oelsner is a professor of International Relations at Argentina’s San Andrés University.