The End of Wilson's Liberal Order | Foreign Affairs - 0 views
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wilson liberal order international relations internationalism foreign policy biden
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He was not a particularly original thinker. More than a century before Wilson proposed the League of Nations, Tsar Alexander I of Russia had alarmed his fellow rulers at the Congress of Vienna by articulating a similar vision: an international system that would rest on a moral consensus upheld by a concert of powers that would operate from a shared set of ideas about legitimate sovereignty.
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Wilson’s contribution was to synthesize those ideas into a concrete program for a rules-based order grounded in a set of international institutions.
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In the decades that followed, however, his ideas became an inspiration and a guide to national leaders, diplomats, activists, and intellectuals around the world.
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Self-determination, the rule of law between and within countries, liberal economics, and the protection of human rights: the “new world order” that both the George H. W. Bush and the Clinton administrations worked to create was very much in the Wilsonian mold.
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When the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, it seemed that the opportunity for a Wilsonian world order had finally come. The former Soviet empire could be reconstructed along Wilsonian lines, and the West could embrace Wilsonian principles more consistently now that the Soviet threat had disappeared.
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American leaders during and after World War II laid the foundations of what they hoped would be a Wilsonian world order, in which international relations would be guided by the principles put forward in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and conducted according to rules established by institutions such as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the World Trade Organization.
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The next stage in world history will not unfold along Wilsonian lines. The nations of the earth will continue to seek some kind of political order, because they must. And human rights activists and others will continue to work toward their goals. But the dream of a universal order, grounded in law, that secures peace between countries and democracy inside them will figure less and less in the work of world leaders.
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Although Wilsonian ideals will not disappear and there will be a continuing influence of Wilsonian thought on U.S. foreign policies, the halcyon days of the post–Cold War era, when American presidents organized their foreign policies around the principles of liberal internationalism, are unlikely to return anytime soon.
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the pre-Wilsonian European order had moved significantly in the direction of elevating human rights to the level of diplomacy.
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The preservation of the balance of power was invoked as a goal to guide states; war, although regrettable, was seen as a legitimate element of the system. From Wilson’s standpoint, these were fatal flaws that made future conflagrations inevitable. To redress them, he sought to build an order in which states would accept enforceable legal restrictions on their behavior at home and their international conduct.
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Although Wilson was an American, his view of world order was first and foremost developed as a method for managing international politics in Europe, and it is in Europe where Wilson’s ideas have had their greatest success and where their prospects continue to look strongest.
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His ideas were treated with bitter and cynical contempt by most European statesmen when he first proposed them, but they later became the fundamental basis of the European order, enshrined in the laws and practices of the EU.
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The real problem of Wilsonianism is not a naive faith in good intentions but a simplistic view of the historical process, especially when it comes to the impact of technological progress on human social order.
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Wilson was the devout son of a minister, deeply steeped in Calvinist teachings about predestination and the utter sovereignty of God, and he believed that the arc of progress was fated
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he shared the optimism of what the scholar Herbert Butterfield called “the Whig historians,” the Victorian-era British thinkers who saw human history as a narrative of inexorable progress and betterment. Wilson believed that the so-called ordered liberty that characterized the Anglo-American countries had opened a path to permanent prosperity and peace.
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Today’s Wilsonians have given this determinism a secular twist: in their eyes, liberalism will rule the future and bring humanity to “the end of history” as a result of human nature rather than divine purpose
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In the early 1990s, leading U.S. foreign policymakers and commentators saw the fall of the Soviet Union through the same deterministic prism: as a signal that the time had come for a truly global and truly liberal world order. On all three occasions, Wilsonian order builders seemed to be in sight of their goal. But each time, like Ulysses, they were blown off course by contrary winds.
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Technical difficulties Today, those winds are gaining strength. Anyone hoping to reinvigorate the flagging Wilsonian project must contend with a number of obstacles
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The most obvious is the return of ideology-fueled geopolitics. China, Russia, and a number of smaller powers aligned with them—Iran, for example—correctly see Wilsonian ideals as a deadly threat to their domestic arrangements.
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Seeing Wilsonianism as a cover for American and, to some degree, EU ambitions, Beijing and Moscow have grown increasingly bold about contesting Wilsonian ideas and initiatives inside international institutions such as the UN and on the ground in places from Syria to the South China Sea.
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It raises the risks and costs for Wilsonian powers to intervene in conflicts beyond their own borders.
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The presence of great powers in the anti-Wilsonian coalition also provides shelter and assistance to smaller powers that otherwise might not choose to resist the status quo
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Finally, the membership of countries such as China and Russia in international institutions makes it more difficult for those institutions to operate in support of Wilsonian norms: take, for example, Chinese and Russian vetoes in the UN Security Council, the election of anti-Wilsonian representatives to various UN bodies, and the opposition by countries such as Hungary and Poland to EU measures intended to promote the rule of law.
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Biological and technological research, by contrast, are critical for any country or company that hopes to remain competitive in the twenty-first century. An uncontrollable, multipolar arms race across a range of cutting-edge technologies is on the horizon, and it will undercut hopes for a revived Wilsonian order.
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The irony is that Wilsonians often believe that technological progress will make the world more governable and politics more rational—even if it also adds to the danger of war by making it so much more destructive. Wilson himself believed just that, as did the postwar order builders and the liberals who sought to extend the U.S.-led order after the Cold War. Each time, however, this faith in technological change was misplaced
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As seen most recently with the rise of the Internet, although new technologies often contribute to the spread of liberal ideas and practices, they can also undermine democratic systems and aid authoritarian regimes.
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Meanwhile, the torrent of technological innovation and change known as “the information revolution” creates obstacles for Wilsonian goals
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It also makes it harder for national leaders to pursue the compromises that international cooperation inevitably requires and increases the chances that incoming governments will refuse to be bound by the acts of their predecessors.
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Wilsonians prioritize arms control not just because nuclear warfare could destroy the human race but also because, even if unused, nuclear weapons or their equivalent put the Wilsonian dream of a completely rules-based, law-bound international order out of reach. Weapons of mass destruction guarantee exactly the kind of state sovereignty that Wilsonians think is incompatible with humanity’s long-term security. One cannot easily stage a humanitarian intervention against a nuclear power.
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What is more, the technological progress that underlies the information revolution significantly exacerbates the problem of arms control. The development of cyberweapons and the potential of biological agents to inflict strategic damage on adversaries—graphically demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic—serve as warnings that new tools of warfare will be significantly more difficult to monitor or control than nuclear technology.
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Today, as new technologies disrupt entire industries, and as social media upends the news media and election campaigning, politics is becoming more turbulent and polarized in many countries.
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it’s not for everybody One of the central assumptions behind the quest for a Wilsonian order is the belief that as countries develop, they become more similar to already developed countries and will eventually converge on the liberal capitalist model that shapes North America and western Europe
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The Wilsonian project requires a high degree of convergence to succeed; the member states of a Wilsonian order must be democratic, and they must be willing and able to conduct their international relations within liberal multilateral institutions.
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Today, China, India, Russia, and Turkey all seem less likely to converge on liberal democracy than they did in 1990. These countries and many others have developed economically and technologically not in order to become more like the West but rather to achieve a deeper independence from the West and to pursue civilizational and political goals of their own.
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In truth, Wilsonianism is a particularly European solution to a particularly European set of problems
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With the specter of great-power war constantly hanging over them, European states developed a more intricate system of diplomacy and international politics than did countries in other parts of the world.
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Although it would take another devastating world war to ensure that Germany, as well as its Western neighbors, would adhere to the rules of a new system, Europe was already prepared for the establishment of a Wilsonian order.
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The idea of a single legitimate state with no true international peers is as deeply embedded in the political culture of China as the idea of a multistate system grounded in mutual recognition is embedded in that of Europe. There have been clashes among Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, but until the late nineteenth century, interstate conflict was rare.
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In human history as a whole, enduring civilizational states seem more typical than the European pattern of rivalry among peer states.
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For states and peoples in much of the world, the problem of modern history that needed to be solved was not the recurrence of great-power conflict. The problem, instead, was figuring out how to drive European powers awa
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International institutions face an even greater crisis of confidence. Voters skeptical of the value of technocratic rule by fellow citizens are even more skeptical of foreign technocrats with suspiciously cosmopolitan views
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After colonialism formally ended and nascent countries began to assert control over their new territories, the classic problems of governance in the postcolonial world remained weak states and compromised sovereignty.
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The recent rise of populist movements across the West has revealed another danger to the Wilsonian project. If the United States could elect Donald Trump as president in 2016, what might it do in the future? What might the electorates in other important countries do? And if the Wilsonian order has become so controversial in the West, what are its prospects in the rest of the world?
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Postcolonial and non-Western states often joined international institutions as a way to recover and enhance their sovereignty, not to surrender it, and their chief interest in international law was to protect weak states from strong ones, not to limit the power of national leaders to consolidate their authority
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Yet from the standpoint of Wilson and his fellow progressives, the solution to these problems could not be simply to vest power in the voters. At the time, most Americans still had an eighth-grade education or less
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The progressives’ answer to this problem was to support the creation of an apolitical expert class of managers and administrators. The progressives sought to build an administrative state that would curb the excessive power of the rich and redress the moral and political deficiencies of the poor.
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The Internet and social media have undermined respect for all forms of expertise. Ordinary citizens today are significantly better educated and feel less need to rely on expert guidance. And events including the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the 2008 financial crisis, and the inept government responses during the 2020 pandemic have seriously reduced confidence in experts and technocrats, whom many people have come to see as forming a nefarious “deep state.”
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Wilson lived in an era when democratic governance faced problems that many feared were insurmountable. The Industrial Revolution had divided American society, creating unprecedented levels of inequality.
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when it comes to international challenges such as climate change and mass migration, there is little evidence that the cumbersome institutions of global governance and the quarrelsome countries that run them will produce the kind of cheap, elegant solutions that could inspire public trust.
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For all these reasons, the movement away from the Wilsonian order is likely to continue, and world politics will increasingly be carried out along non-Wilsonian and in some cases even anti-Wilsonian lines
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the international order will increasingly be shaped by states that are on diverging paths. This does not mean an inevitable future of civilizational clashes, but it does mean that global institutions will have to accommodate a much wider range of views and values than they have in the past.
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Non-Wilsonian orders have existed both in Europe and in other parts of the world in the past, and the nations of the world will likely need to draw on these examples as they seek to cobble together some kind of framework for stability and, if possible, peace under contemporary conditions.
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For U.S. policymakers, the developing crisis of the Wilsonian order worldwide presents vexing problems that are likely to preoccupy presidential administrations for decades to come. One problem is that many career officials and powerful voices in Congress, civil society organizations, and the press deeply believe not only that a Wilsonian foreign policy is a good and useful thing for the United States but also that it is the only path to peace and security and even to the survival of civilization and humanity.
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Those factions will be hemmed in by the fact that any internationalist coalition in American foreign policy must rely to a significant degree on Wilsonian voters. But a generation of overreach and poor political judgment has significantly reduced the credibility of Wilsonian ideas among the American electorate.
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But American foreign policy is always a coalition affair. As I wrote in my book Special Providence, Wilsonians are one of four schools that have contended to shape American foreign policy since the eighteenth century.
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Hamiltonians and Wilsonians largely dominated American foreign-policy making after the Cold War, but Obama began to reintroduce some Jeffersonian ideas about restraint, and after the Libyan misadventure, his preference for that approach clearly strengthened.
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Trump, who hung a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, sought to build a nationalist coalition of Jacksonians and Jeffersonians against the globalist coalition of Hamiltonians and Wilsonians that had been ascendant since World War II.
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Even as the Biden administration steers American foreign policy away from the nationalism of the Trump period, it will need to re-adjust the balance between the Wilsonian approach and the ideas of the other schools in light of changed political conditions at home and abroad.
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Saving the planet from a climate catastrophe and building a coalition to counter China are causes that many Wilsonians will agree both require and justify a certain lack of scrupulosity when it comes to the choice of both allies and tactics.
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The Biden administration can also make use of other techniques that past presidents have used to gain the support of Wilsonians
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Even as the ultimate goals of Wilsonian policy become less achievable, there are particular issues on which intelligent and focused American policy can produce results that Wilsonians will like
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International cooperation to make money laundering more difficult and to eliminate tax havens is one area where progress is possible.
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Concern for international public health will likely stay strong for some years after the COVID-19 pandemic has ended.
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Promoting education for underserved groups in foreign countries—women, ethnic and religious minorities, the poor—is one of the best ways to build a better world,
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however problematic Wilson’s personal views and domestic policies were, as a statesman and ideologist, he must be counted among the most influential makers of the modern world