Patrick Porter - The False Promise of Liberal Order: Nostalgia, Delusion and the Rise of Trump

For Jane For everything

And for Hugh Alexander Porter Welcome aboard

Patrick Porter

polity

Copyright Patrick Porter 2020

The right of Patrick Porter to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2020 by Polity Press

Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3869-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Porter, Patrick, 1976- author.
Title: The false promise of liberal order: nostalgia, delusion and the rise of Trump / Patrick Porter.
Description: Cambridge ; Medford, MA: Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: A radical critique of US-led liberal foreign policy-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019047003 (print) | LCCN 2019047004 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509538676 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509538683 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509538690 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Trump, Donald, 1946- | Hegemony--United States. | World politics. | Liberalism. | United States--Foreign relations--20th century. | United States--Foreign relations--21st century.
Classification: LCC JZ1480 .P664 2020 (print) | LCC JZ1480 (ebook) | DDC 327.73--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047003
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047004

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Many writers have dreamed up republics and kingdoms that bear no resemblance to experience.

Niccol Machiavelli

I am grateful to Louise Knight at Polity for talking me into this, and to Ins Boxman who helped steer it through. Likewise, I am grateful to Chris Preble for talking me into the first version, which the Cato Institute kindly published and permitted us to draw on. And for permissions to reproduce material, thanks are due to Taylor & Francis, The Washington Quarterly, Daniel Immerwahr and Josh Shifrinson. I am grateful, for everything, to my wife Jane Rogers and to Hugh, our first-born, and to my family Brian, Muriel, Emily and Patrick, and to Frances Rogers for keeping the fires burning.

This book grew out of many conversations with friends, colleagues and worthy adversaries. My gratitude goes to David Blagden, Jeanne Morefield, Robert Saunders, Joshua Shifrinson, Tanisha Fazal, Michael Mazarr, Rosella Cappella Zielinski, Ryan Grauer, Apratim Sahay, Justin Logan, John Bew, Lawrence Freedman, Jennifer Lind, Robert Kagan, John Ikenberry, Daniel Deudney, Kori Schake, Jake Sullivan, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Barry Posen, Charles Glaser, Thomas Wright, David Adesnik, Hal Brands, Gil Barndollar, Peter Hitchens, Malcolm Chalmers, Daniel Deudney, Matt Fay, Michael Lind, Rebecca Lissner, Mira Rapp-Hooper, Asaf Siniver, Jamie Gaskarth, David Dunn, Mark Webber, Tim Haughton, Adam Quinn, Mike Sweeney, Stephen Wertheim, Daniel Nexon, Tarak Barkawi, Jerrod Laber, David Edelstein, Daniel Bessner, Chris Preble, John Glaser, Eric Gomez, Emma Ashford, Geraint Hughes, James Goldgeier, Jonathan Kirshner, Randy Schweller, Andreas Behnke, Mark Kramer and Dan Drezner.

Anyone writing about international order is in the debt of Hedley Bull and Robert Gilpin. I was never lucky enough to meet either, but hope they would have thought this book worthwhile. We are also intellectually indebted to two Johns Mearsheimer and Ikenberry who, after the fall of the wall, built the theoretical floor on which the rest of us dance. The first John helped to hammer out the realist tradition that has inspired this work. And while I challenge the second Johns arguments, this book would not have been possible without his seminal body of thought.

Lastly, a word about the United States. Much of what follows is wintry. That wintriness does not flow from hostility. To the contrary, it is offered in a spirit of tough love, in solidarity with Americans and their allies who sense that something has gone very wrong. And in this century, flattery has gotten the republic nowhere.

In Cormac McCarthys noir western novel, No Country for Old Men, an honourable sheriff sees brutal, lawless days fall on his county, seemingly out of nowhere. He seeks solace by imagining a lost era of chivalry. He recalls an era when lawmen didnt bear arms, a world that never was. In the face of inexplicable evil, his dream gives him something to hold onto and affords him dignity. It also paralyses him, making him a hapless witness to the chaos. Substitute the violent frontier for the world and the sheriff for foreign policy traditionalists, and a similar reaction is now under way in our angry days. Aghast that the time is out of joint, with the rise of President Donald Trump, populist demagogues and dangerous authoritarian regimes abroad, a group of people lament a dying order and the passing of American primacy in the world. They look back to a nobler past. Like the sheriff, they sense an end time has arrived. And like the sheriff, their invocations of a lost era cannot restore it. Invoking an imagined past impoverishes history. And it damages our capacity to act effectively under a darkening sky.

This is a book about euphemisms. Euphemisms are nice-sounding words that enable us to talk about a thing while avoiding its brutal realities. In this time of tumult, a set of evasive and soothing images about the past has come together, to imagine a lost world, a so-called liberal order. Pleasant words, like leadership and rules-based international order, abound as a dispute grows over international relations. That dispute concerns the most important questions: how did we get here? And what must we do? As I argue, the concept of liberal order is misleading, as is the dream of its restoration. Ordering and the business of hegemony is rough work, even for the United States, the least bad hegemon. If we want to forge an alternative order to the vision of Trump, it cannot be built in a dream palace. Only by gazing at historys darkness can we confront the choices of today.

Orders are hierarchies created by the strong, to keep the peace on their terms. There have been many orders: Roman, Byzantine, Imperial Chinese, Ottoman, Mughal, Spanish, French and British. They are often also imperial in their working. After all, most of history is a history of empire, a form of power that exercises final control over its subject societies. The great powers that do the ordering remake the world partly through institutions and norms, and partly through the smack of coercion. Orders encourage a politeness of sorts, but a politeness that ultimately rests on the threat of force. When lesser powers forget this, the dominant states quickly remind them, as in 1956 when President Dwight Eisenhower threatened Britain with an economic crisis if it didnt cease its military adventure over Suez. Supposedly, according to their creators, orders remake the world in ways that replace chaos with regularity, making international life more legible, peaceable and secure.