Fragile

Victory
The Making and Unmaking of
Liberal Order

JAMES E. CRONIN
 Note to Readers
The Invasion of Ukraine and Liberal Order

F
ragile Victory is a history of the creation of a liberal interna-
tional order in the 1940s, its stabilization and maintenance
throughout the postwar era, its dramatic but flawed expansion
after the end of the Cold War, and its weakening after 2000. The
book argues that the progress of liberal order was always fraught and
never entirely secure. Its establishment required inspiration, diligence,
and resources and was in no way inevitable. So, too, the related history
of liberal democracy, which was nurtured by the existence of a liberal
international order and which in turn helped to sustain it. Both have been
under threat since the turn of the millennium. Now, Russia’s brutal inva-
sion of Ukraine, its targeting of civilian populations, and wanton destruc-
tion have made that threat a reality, painted in deep red. Although the
solidarity of Western democracies and of NATO in the face of these events
has shown the potential resilience of the sort of liberal democratic inter-
nationalism that kept the peace in Europe for almost 80 years, the pros-
pects of liberal order and democracy have nevertheless become more
uncertain.
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. For months, Ameri-
can and British intelligence had reported that Russian troops were de-
ploying on Ukraine’s border and likely to cross it, while Putin, his
spokespeople, and compliant Russian media had denied it. The invaders

ix
x Not e to Re a ders

advanced on multiple fronts: the Donbas region in the east, where sup-
porters and surrogates of Russia had been fighting since 2014; the south,
particularly against ports like Mariupol; and the capital, Kyiv, from the
east and the north. The Russians moved in large numbers of tanks and
artillery, which they used to pound their opponents. Many Ukrainians
died, property destruction was enormous, and millions were forced to
flee. Since the invasion had been predicted for months, it was not a com-
plete surprise. Still, it shocked the world and left experts second-guessing
themselves. Nothing on this scale had occurred in Europe since 1945,
and nothing like this was supposed to happen in the post–Cold War era.
The response brought more surprises. Ukrainians fought back ef-
fectively, slowing the advance toward Kyiv. Russian troops began to
withdraw from the area in early April, leaving behind destroyed towns
and dead, apparently executed, inhabitants—clear evidence of war
crimes.1 Elsewhere, Ukrainians harassed Russian forces using their own
rather basic, and sometimes improvised, weapons and arms supplied by
western countries. Ukraine’s success was genuinely heroic. Its leadership,
particularly that of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, acquitted itself mas-
terfully, demonstrating courage, defiance, and tactical savvy.
Ukraine was aided by the ineptitude of the Russian military, which
was unprepared for resistance and had no plan for overcoming it other
than brutal bombing. It turned out that Russia’s armed forces, though
reputed to be highly trained and armed with sophisticated weaponry,
performed poorly. Logistics were botched, and Russia’s vast superiority
in numbers and in equipment was largely nullified. It was widely re-
ported that morale was low to begin with and got worse as fighting con-
tinued. Though it will be some time before the details and dimensions of
the failures are known, over the first two months of the war, the Russians
were embarrassed, and Putin’s boasts were revealed as hollow.
The response of NATO and other allies was the second thing Putin
miscalculated. The United States and its NATO allies worked effectively
together to send supplies to Ukraine and, even more surprisingly, united
behind several rounds of increasingly drastic sanctions that severely
curtailed Russia’s ability to participate in the global economy. Gas and
oil were still sent to Europe, and payments flowed back, but serious ef-
forts were at least begun to find alternative energy sources and to lessen
 Not e to Re a de r s  xi

dependence on Russia. Europeans, especially the Germans, counted on

Russian imports to heat their homes, drive their cars, and power their
industries. Putin counted on this to prevent an effective collective re-
sponse to his move in Ukraine. It seems he also overestimated the dam-
age that Donald Trump had done to NATO.2
Whatever the outcome of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has
caused a rupture in the international system that will not easily or
quickly be repaired. The liberal order was under duress well before
Putin’s reckless move: Russia’s revanchism and China’s desire to acquire
geopolitical influence to match its economic clout had already made the
world more multipolar and less liberal. The war in Ukraine was a more
decisive break. Russia, because of Putin’s actions, has become something
of a pariah. It is difficult to imagine just how it could rejoin the interna-
tional community whose norms it has so recently and so brazenly vio-
lated. When the war ends, on whatever terms, Putin and Russia will want
to escape their isolation, but it is not very likely that the nations and in-
stitutions that imposed sanctions will be willing to lift them and wel-
come Russia back without painful concessions on the part of Russia.
Given the drastic consequences of the invasion, it seems important
to try to understand why Putin made the choice he did. The simplest
approach would be to take him at his word. Unfortunately, the rhetoric
and reasoning he offered cannot be taken seriously. Ukraine, with its
Jewish president, was not run by neo-Nazis; Ukraine was not commit-
ting genocide in the Donbas; and NATO was not directly threatening
Russia.3 Still worse, Putin and his allies have made it clear that they do
not regard Ukraine as a legitimate nation but rather as a wayward child
of Mother Russia. The logic is to eliminate it as an independent state.
It is tempting to try to locate a kernel of rationality in Putin’s think-
ing and Russian moves, if only because figuring that out might reveal the
path to a resolution of the conflict. What appears most plausible is the
argument about NATO expansion. Russia long objected to NATO’s
move to the east, and in the early 1990s American and German leaders
did hint to Gorbachev and Yeltsin that NATO, or at least NATO forces,
would not encroach on Russia and its interests. There was never a formal
agreement, however, and one major party to the discussions—the Soviet
Union—ceased even to exist in 1991. The United States and NATO
x ii Not e to Re a ders

nevertheless made serious efforts to work with Russia to make expansion

less threatening. The Clinton administration proposed the “Partnership
for Peace” in 1993 as a mechanism for managing the security needs of
the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Russia formally joined in
1994. Clinton and his advisors walked a fine line between the pleas of
nations in the east for NATO membership and Russia’s opposition to it,
making sure to delay the admission of new members until after Yeltsin’s
reelection in 1996. Accession talks between NATO and Poland, Hungary,
and the Czech Republic began in earnest in the fall of 1997, but the pro-
cess was preceded by the signing of the NATO-Russia Founding Act in
May, another effort to assuage Russian concerns. The three countries
would formally join in March 1999. At that moment, Russian leaders
seemed more upset about the bombing of Belgrade and the fate of the
war criminal, Slobodan Milošević, than about NATO enlargement per se.
NATO would expand further, and Russian leaders would continue
to object, but the disagreements were managed without crisis. It is rea-
sonable to argue that US and NATO leaders could have done better at
reassuring Russia. The declaration at the Bucharest meeting in 2007 stat-
ing that the Ukraine and Georgia would become members—pushed by
the outgoing Bush administration over the objections of France and
Germany—was clearly a mistake. Even so, the statement was not accom-
panied by a plan for membership and no further efforts would be under-
taken to make it happen. While the question of NATO was being
debated in the 1990s, Russia had at least twice promised to respect
Ukraine’s sovereignty. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine
agreed to give up its nuclear missiles, and in response, both Russia and
the United States pledged to respect Ukraine’s borders and indepen-
dence. Russia made a similar commitment in 1997 when it reached an
agreement with Ukraine on leasing the naval base at Sevastopol on the
Black Sea. What was it about the process of NATO enlargement that
could have pushed Russia to violate its promises and invade Ukraine?
The answer, it would seem, is everything and nothing. NATO’s action
may have been an irritant to successive Russian leaders, but it would be
naïve to think it would cause or provoke Putin’s decision to go to war.4
If NATO expansion cannot explain the choice for war, what might?
The answer is likely extremely complicated, but the fundamental issue
 Not e to Re a de r s  x iii

would seem to be the divergent histories of Russia and Ukraine since

1991. Chronology is important here. Ukraine’s independence referen-
dum in December 1991 precipitated the end of the Soviet Union. Since
then, it has been eager to unwind its ties to Russia and has moved, hesi-
tantly and inconsistently, toward becoming a stable democracy. The new
nation contained many whose first language was Russian, but that did
not prevent them from identifying as Ukrainian as well. Most impor-
tantly, the Ukrainians have twice rebelled to rid themselves of a leader
who was too close and too beholden to Russia. The first occasion was the
so-called Orange Revolution that began in late 2004. In the run-off elec-
tion of November 21, independent polling agencies announced that
Viktor Yushchenko had defeated the pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yan-
ukovich. The next day, however, the official election commission claimed
otherwise. Opposition erupted and after massive and sustained protests
and violent repression, the election was run again. In January, Yushchen-
ko prevailed and took office.
Politics remained unstable in Ukraine, and corruption under-
mined faith in political leaders on all sides. Public opinion, meanwhile,
moved steadily behind a vision of Ukraine’s future as aligned with the
West and as a member of the European Union. There were also move-
ments toward “decommunization”: more open debate about the reality
of the Holodomor, the mass starvation of 1932–33; beheadings of stat-
ues of Stalin; and the removal of monuments to Lenin.5 Yanukovich nev-
ertheless managed to get himself elected president in 2010, but in office
he was pressured to acquiesce to an association agreement with the EU.
On the eve of signing the agreement in November 2013, he came under
intense pressure from Vladimir Putin. Yanukovich reneged and agreed
instead to a Russian loan and to joining with Russia in a Eurasian eco-
nomic organization.
His caving in to Putin provoked the second uprising against the
pro-Russian president. It began on November 21, 2013, and brought
thousands into the streets and, more specifically, into Independence
Square (the Maidan) in Kyiv, which gave the movement its name: Euro-
maidan. Protests continued to build through November and December
and were met with increasing violence and repression. “Anti-protest”
laws proposed in mid-January further inflamed opponents, and when
x iv Not e to Re a ders

talks failed in late February, Yanukovich fled to the east, ending up in

Moscow on February 26. The Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s parliament)
declared that he had abandoned his duties and thus forfeited office—
while demonstrators entered his massive estate, Mezhyhirya, revealing a
zoo, golf course, a fleet of cars, and a boat. An interim president was ap-
pointed, and in May elections Petra Poroshenko was elected president.
Russia and Putin were not happy: they responded by sending
troops into Crimea at the beginning of March 2014. They seized control
with little opposition and quickly organized a referendum on whether
Crimea should secede from Ukraine and become part of Russia. A
frankly unbelievable majority agreed and the region was incorporated
into Russia on March 18. Russia also began to encourage and to assist
local pro-Russian forces in the Donbas in their efforts to take control of
the region. Russia’s allies and supporters advanced, then were pushed
back, at which point actual Russian forces fought back. The result was a
local stalemate that dragged on into 2022 and in which thousands lost
their lives. The invasion of February 2022 initiated a new round of con-
flict in the eastern part of the country. While Putin’s intention was obvi-
ously to turn Ukraine away from the Europe and back toward Russia, his
tactics backfired. After 2014 Ukrainians became more determined to
move toward the West, mainly toward the EU but increasingly also to-
ward NATO. It was this resolve that underpinned their surprisingly
strong and effective resistance to the attack by Russian forces in 2022.
The political trajectory of Russia after 1991 ran in the opposite
direction. Gorbachev was genuinely interested in moving the country
toward the values and practices common in the West. Yeltsin was also
inclined in that direction, but his rule was regularly contested by the
enduring strength of extreme nationalists and former communists. Lib-
eral political leaders and parties consistently failed to attract voters. Per-
haps most important, Russians of all persuasions were deeply traumatized
by the economic and political collapse of the early and mid-1990s. It was
not just the former KGB officer Putin who regarded the break-up of the
Soviet Union as a “geopolitical catastrophe.” Well before Putin rendered
his judgement, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist leader, claimed
that “the Russian people have become the most humiliated nation on the
planet.”6 The implication was that once Russia regained its strength, it
 Not e to Re a de r s  xv

would be justified in reasserting its domination within and even beyond

its sphere of influence.
The Russian economy stabilized in the late 1990s and began to
grow under Putin from 2000. Russia has huge reserves of oil and gas, and
rising prices and demand made the country more prosperous. Putin
launched a second war against Chechnya and brutally suppressed rebel-
lion there. He also made minor economic reforms in his first years in
office and spoke as if he wanted to be a good European. That began to
change after 2003: he criticized the United States over the war in Iraq;
and he was deeply shaken by the “color revolutions” in Georgia (2003–4),
Ukraine (2004–5), and Kyrgystan (2005). These made it clear that re-
gimes in the post-Soviet space were fragile structures and presumably
caused Putin to worry that Russians might want their own color revolu-
tion. Putin more or less officially announced his turn against the liberal
order, and the United States especially, in his speech to the Munich Secu-
rity Conference in 2007, in which he made a point of denouncing Amer-
ica’s global role and institutions like the Organization for Security and
Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which had helped to legitimize the
color revolutions. In August 2008, he demonstrated his turn to hostility
with a brief military campaign on behalf of separatist regions in Georgia.
Putin had handed over the presidency to his close ally Dmitry Medvedev,
and in May he became prime minister. When Putin maneuvered to be-
come president again, protests broke out against supposedly rigged elec-
tions in early December 2011. These and subsequent demonstrations of
discontent were easily enough suppressed, but Putin’s fears of a color
revolution in Russia were confirmed. Putin blamed the United States,
NGOs with western connections, and Hillary Clinton. It was in this con-
text that Russia responded to the Euromaidan revolution with an obvi-
ous violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty accompanied by real violence.
What was and is Putin’s goal? Where will he stop in his drive to
restore Russian pride and reverse its supposed humiliation? Geopoliti-
cally, the aim seems to be to bring together Great Russia, White Russia
(Belarus), and Little Russia (Ukraine) on the model of the Russian em-
pire before 1917. This goal is now, however, being described in messi-
anic and civilizational terms. The Putin government has developed close
ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, whose Patriarch Kirill labeled
x v i Not e to Re a ders

Putin’s rule “a miracle of God” and twice supported invasions of Ukraine.

The church helps justify Putin’s aggression by claiming that Russia is
battling for Christianity and morality against a secular, decadent, and
consumerist West that destroys the family and pushes for LGBTQ rights.
The link between the Orthodox leadership and the Russian state was
perhaps best symbolized by the building of the Cathedral of the Russian
Armed Forces, consecrated in June 2020.
Putin has surrounded himself with advisors who echo these views
and the reactionary arguments of writers and philosophers like the “white
Russian” thinker and avowed fascist Ivan Ilyin; the extreme nationalist
writer and editor Aleksandr Prokhanov, advocate for a Russian “fifth em-
pire”; and Aleksandr Dugin, critic of the Euro-Atlantic world. Putin helped
to arrange, for example, the removal of Ilyin’s remains from Switzerland to
a monastery in Moscow in 2005. He also presided over the construction in
Moscow of statues of Ivan the Terrible and St. Vladimir, the tenth-century
ruler of Kievan Rus who converted to Orthodoxy. The Putin regime has
actively worked to promote this odd and toxic ideological brew, appoint-
ing a proponent, Vladimir Medinsky, as Minister of Culture from 2012–20.
Medinsky was later tasked with leading the Russian team negotiating with
Ukraine after the invasion, surely an indication the Putin was not inter-
ested in bargaining toward a peace settlement.
Is this alliance of church and state and mixing of apocalyptic reli-
gion and government policy merely opportunistic? on one or both sides?
Or is it a sign that Putin himself sees his actions as part of a world-
historic struggle? Whichever it is—and it could be an amalgam—it makes
it hard to envision Russia’s role in the world after the invasion of Ukraine.
If this is Holy War, how and on what terms are peace and its inevitable
compromises possible? Russia has already broken the norms on which
the liberal world order was premised: respect for self-determination and
sovereignty. How can that breach be repaired?
If Putin’s venture were thwarted, and widely perceived to have been,
the rift in the international order could begin to heal. That seems un-
likely, however, and absent a Russian defeat and a new leadership, Russia
will be regarded for a long time as a disruptive force internationally, and
the global order will remain fractured. The world economy will also like-
ly be reshaped in important ways. Russia will become more self-reliant,
 Not e to Re a de r s  x v ii

but considerably poorer as a result. It will also reorient its exports away
from the West, though its new customers will have less to sell back to
Russia. Russia will probably become closer to, perhaps even dependent
on, China, but China will be the dominant partner in that arrangement.
Countries that have opposed the Russian invasion will also reorient their
economies. Even before Russia’s move, there was a growing awareness of
the need to reshape supply chains and to encourage the domestic pro-
duction of strategic goods, and the list of those will undoubtedly grow.
The Europeans will need to wean themselves from their reliance on So-
viet energy sources by speeding up the transition from fossil fuels and, in
the meantime, by diversifying the sources of essential goods. These pro-
cesses will not happen overnight, but they would seem almost inevitable,
and the effect will be a reconfigured global economy.
None of this means that the institutions through which the inter-
national system functions will all collapse. They will stand, but they will
function less well, and there will likely be more violations of norms,
more conflicts, and more violence. It will be difficult if not impossible to
describe the international system as liberal or even rules-based. Russia
and Putin will not be completely ostracized, for they have critical re-
sources and, however poorly it has performed of late, a powerful and
nuclear-armed military. Even though much of the world recoiled in hor-
ror at Russia’s action in Ukraine, countries like China, India, and Indo-
nesia did not impose sanctions or cut ties.7 But the more prosperous
West did, and given its economic clout and its central role in interna-
tional finance and the fact that Russia’s exports mostly flow in that direc-
tion, Putin’s continued isolation will have major costs. There will be pain
all around, and fear of what the resort to the politics of force portends.
The promise of liberal order will endure, but realizing it will take longer
and face more obstacles than it had before the invasion of Ukraine.

Notes
1. On the Russian military’s mixed record since 2014, see Lawrence Freedman,
Ukraine and the Art of Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), and his posts
on the 2022 invasion on Comment is Freed: Sam and Lawrence Freedman, samf@substack.
com.
2. Very big questions about NATO’s future nevertheless remain, even if they
have been momentarily eclipsed. See, for example, Adam Tooze, “The Second Coming of
x v iii Not e to Re a ders

Nato: The Alliance Has Been Revived –But It Can’t Save the West,” New Statesman, May
18, 2022.
3. There are extreme nationalists in Ukraine with links to a sordid if complicated
past, but they do not run the state. In recent elections, they have received very few votes.
4. Much has been written on the issue of NATO and Russia. For the most recent
and reliable assessment, see M. E. Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making
of Post–Cold War Stalemate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021); and also Serhii
Plokhy and Mary Sarotte, “The Shoals of Ukraine: Where American Illusions and Great-
Power Politics Collide,” Foreign Affairs 99, No. 1 (January/February 2020), 85–91.
5. See especially Serhii Plokhy, The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Pres-
ent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies,
2021); Larry Wolff, “Governed in Slavery: the troubled rebirth of Ukraine,” TLS (Times
Literary Supplement), May 27, 2022; and Tim Snyder, “The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial
War,” New Yorker, April 28, 2022.
6. New York Times, January 11, 1996.
7. See Angela Stent, “The West vs. the Rest,” Foreign Policy, May 2, 2022; and,
more generally, Anne Applebaum, “There Is No Liberal World Order,” The Atlantic, May
2022.
 Introduction
Liberal Order and Its Troubled History

T
he results of two elections in 2016—the “yes” vote in the
Brexit referendum in Britain and the election of Donald Trump
in America—shocked observers and participants in equal
measure. The most prominent supporters of Brexit were clue-
less and without a plan on the morning after, and by all accounts Trump
did not expect to win either. Opponents of Brexit and Trump had diffi-
culty believing what had happened and kept thinking and hoping that
the results did not mean what in fact they did mean. Brexit seemed so
inexplicably wrong that many thought it would be reversed outright or
somehow fudged. Trump was so outrageous as a candidate that people
could not help but hope that a different person would emerge once he
assumed office. Such hopes were soon disappointed in both the UK and
the US. What remained were two overriding questions: how did these
largely unpredicted results come about; and what did the choices portend?
The questions were closely related, for both votes were essentially
negative, rejections of what had been assumed by many to be stable and
worthy features of the political and economic landscape at home and
abroad. While the roots of these rejections may well have been domestic,
as voters do not regularly make decisions based on foreign policy, what
was explicitly rejected in each case was the nation’s status in and engage-
ment with the world outside. Internal and external were inextricably

1
2 i n t rodu c t ion

linked. Brexit, by definition, was a campaign about whether the United

Kingdom should break its association with its closest neighbors and
largest trading partner and withdraw from the organization through
which it effectively managed its relationships with the global economy.
Trump’s pitch was, as he put it at his inauguration, about “American
carnage,” which had come about because foreigners had systematically
taken advantage of the US. In Trump’s telling America had been disad-
vantaged by trade, most obviously by China but also by its NATO allies.
The United States was also supposedly inundated by waves of unwanted
and possibly criminal immigrants, legal and illegal, and by refugees
whose claims were spurious. The appropriate response, according to
Trump, was a policy of “America First” that would entail restrictions on
immigrants and refugees, demands that allies pay more for the security
the United States provided, the repudiation and renegotiation of trade
deals like NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement), and the
imposition of tariffs to redress trade imbalances. Trump’s domestic pro-
gram was minimal and frankly contradictory—tax cuts, the Republican
staple, plus increased spending on infrastructure and no cuts to, even
possibly increases in, entitlements. He meant little of what he said, or so
it would seem by his behavior in office, and he achieved very little be-
yond a massive tax cut skewed to benefit the well-to-do. On matters of
foreign policy, including trade, presidents have more discretion; and
Trump moved, fitfully and often ineffectively, to make things happen in
that sphere. Much the same could be said of British Conservatives since
2016: they gestured toward a move away from their signature policy of
austerity, but did very little to reverse it; instead, they spent virtually all
of their energy trying to sort out Brexit and eventually make it happen.
The emphasis on the international, and on external threats, was almost a
substitute for the lack of a domestic program, serving to anchor a cam-
paign whose mass appeal was grounded in a sense of grievance and
powered by an aggrieved national identity.
The import of the international in Brexit and with Trump has not
unreasonably been seen as a “crisis of the liberal international order.”1
This formulation is useful in identifying something quite distinctive in
the two elections, but it needs to be clarified and qualified. It is necessary,
above all, to determine just what is meant by liberal order. The phrase is
 i n t rodu c t ion 3

commonly used to describe the principles underlying the set of institu-

tions created near and at the end of the Second World War that largely
governed the postwar relations of states and the workings of the inter-
national economy. The ideas that animated those responsible for design-
ing and putting these in place had deeper roots, of course, but their
realization was a direct consequence of the effort to bring order out of
the chaos of the 1930s and the disaster of the war.2
Characterizing the postwar order as liberal nevertheless demands
a series of qualifications. How liberal was this order; and was it in any
sense a world order? Classical liberalism meant free markets, laissez-
faire in internal economic policy and free trade with the world. Though
the postwar international order aimed to free up trade after the turn to
protectionism in the 1930s, for some time it was more an aspiration
than a reality for many states and key economic sectors. The political
dimension of liberalism was commonly and plausibly understood to
imply democracy and free elections. Those who designed the postwar
order sought to promote democracy in general, but the exceptions were
so egregious as to raise doubts about the design itself. The biggest excep-
tion was empire. The country that did the most to bring the new order
into existence was the United States, which chose to regard itself as anti-
imperial but whose practice often belied that claim. Not only was Amer-
ica large enough to be an empire or imperial state, it got that way by
acting much like a marauding empire, conquering and subjugating the
previous inhabitants of the territories it came to rule. The United States
also had several small colonies of its own but, unlike the European em-
pires with which the nation so often contrasted itself, had no real inter-
est in obtaining or administering a substantial overseas empire. On the
other hand, the United States would build a postwar order in alliance
with those older empires run by the British, the French, the Dutch, the
Belgians, and the Portuguese. Until decolonization stripped those coun-
tries of their imperial possessions, the liberal international order was
complicit in the denial of political independence and self-government
to huge numbers of colonized people. It may well be that ending colo-
nialism was implicit in the project of creating and extending liberal or-
der, but it took a long time—and much struggle and pain—for it to be
achieved.3
4 i n t rodu c t ion

A liberal international order is almost by definition to be built on

liberal politics within states and commitments to foster democratic
norms within and across states. This connection, too, must be qualified,
if only because of the obvious democratic deficits of the dominant pow-
er in the liberal order, the United States. Democracy and voting and rep-
resentation for white men came early in America, quite a bit later for
white women. For Black Americans it took a civil war and two different
reconstructions for democracy to become a reality. Even then, it was far
less secure and complete than for whites. Again, the promise of liberal
order, particularly in the context of the Cold War, may well have encour-
aged the adoption of more democratic norms and practices in America,
but promise and aspiration are not descriptions of what actually is.
The fact that the setting up of a liberal international order coin-
cided with the moment of American global leadership requires that the
concept be qualified still further. It is obvious that the institutions and
structures of the postwar order reinforced the dominance of the United
States as a hegemonic power. Understandably, the invocation of liberal-
ism and liberal order could and did serve as cover and justification for
policies that were in the interests of the United States. Whether that is
sufficient reason to regard the entire structure as a vehicle to secure US
global domination is rather more questionable, for it implies a standard
of behavior that no great power has ever lived up to. Clearly, in bargain-
ing out the terms of the postwar order, the United States and its allies
and rivals sought to protect and advance their national interests, but
they chose to do so in a manner that involved compromise and collabo-
ration as well as self-interest and competition.
That choice was significant. For states to have risen completely
above self-interest would have been unimaginable. To imagine specifi-
cally that the United States, having spent blood and treasure to defeat
the Nazis and Japan, would have decided after the war to cede authority
to the defeated or to states that had failed to prevent the coming of war
and could not on their own stand up to the aggressors in that war, comes
close to fantasy. It was in any case not a fantasy widely shared in the
United States; and absolutely no one could voice such a hope or plan in
the other country that could reasonably be said to have won the war, the
Soviet Union. What the United States did choose was to work with allies
 i n t rodu c t ion 5

to set up an order that involved a degree of shared decision making and

that put distinct limits on America’s freedom of maneuver.4 It should
come as no surprise that the United States and its allies continued to
calculate and seek to advance their separate national interests while con-
structing an international order that was multilateral and largely rules-
based, that mostly promoted democracy, and whose economic
institutions helped fashion a more open world economy. What was no-
table was that the most powerful country in the world decided to pursue
its national interest by creating such a liberal order. To label this behav-
ior imperial is also ahistorical, for it ignores what was historically dis-
tinctive in an order defined by the bargained and brokered dominance
of the United States.
Limits then, and qualifications, must be attached to any notion of
liberal order. The most severe limit to the postwar order was, of course,
geographic. The existence of the Soviet Union and its control over Eastern
Europe meant that nothing like liberal order or liberalism was possible
there. The Chinese Revolution removed another huge area and a giant
share of the world’s population from the order that was being constructed
in the West and Japan. The exclusion of these lands and peoples in the East
meant that the writ of liberal order and democratic rule would not prevail
in large parts of the world. Liberal order, in other words, obtained on only
one side of the Cold War divide and was embedded within a much broader
Cold War order.5 This limitation, however, may well have been useful, per-
haps even a precondition for its relative success. By confining its workings
in geographic space, the Cold War allowed liberal order to be established
and stabilized. Could anything like it have taken root and functioned ef-
fectively on a grander scale?
Clarifying the meaning of liberal order, qualifying how liberal it was,
and taking note of its limits are essential to understanding its history as
well. Telling that history is in turn critical to assessing its present crisis and
prospects. It will become clear that recent challenges to liberal order were
not simply the product of external shocks. They emerged from the com-
bined effects of actions and processes occurring outside the sphere of lib-
eral order and from its internal development and from choices and
adaptations made to the system in the past. The history of liberal order
was extremely complicated and in no way a linear or logical progression.
6 i n t rodu c t ion

Its creation was not easy or automatic but required unique conditions; its
maintenance was not assured, but very much depended on prosperity and
on political systems whose effective functioning was by no means guaran-
teed. The economic formula that was adopted at its founding and followed
for the quarter century after 1945 largely ceased to work in the 1970s and
was replaced with market-friendly policies that altered the meaning of
liberal order. The order’s ability to prevail in the Cold War owed as much
to the failures of the Soviet Union as to its inherent superiority. The mas-
sive extension of liberal order after the Cold War was based partly on its
attractions but also on the absence of viable alternatives. The stalled prog-
ress of that expansion, and in some cases its reversal, after the turn of the
century was predictable. And finally, the weakening of support for liberal
order within the United States, Britain, and elsewhere had its origins in
the evolution of domestic political systems and in the consequences of
economic policies decided upon through those systems.
Making the history of liberal order understandable means putting
its development in context, deciding what the changing context allowed
and precluded, and how context and prior choices combined to produce
the outcomes they did. The illiberal policies and politics of the 1930s
were the realities that the construction of a liberal order was meant to
avoid. Understandings of that dismal decade informed the details of
postwar planning. So, too, did the hard realities of war: the early success
of Germany and Japan meant that much of the world would have to be
reshaped, political institutions recast, and economies thoroughly rebuilt.
The enormity of the tasks more or less demanded a global response and
presaged the need for a world order of some sort. What sort of order
would be possible and whose interests would be privileged were also
largely determined by the war. The emergence of the United States and
the Soviet Union as the dominant military powers, and of the US as the
most productive economy would mean that however much the rhetoric
of war promised democracy and political independence, those two
states would make sure to secure their interests in the peace. More spe-
cifically, it meant that the defense needs of the USSR would decide the
fate of Eastern Europe, the part of the world that probably suffered the
most during the war, first under Nazi conquest and occupation and then
during and after its “liberation” by the Soviets.
 i n t rodu c t ion 7

The Cold War that ensued forced the architects of postwar order to
adapt their plans in unanticipated ways, developing new policies like the
Marshall Plan and institutions like NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The ef-
fect was to create a global division in which liberal order was operative
and democracy the norm in one part of a now bipolar world while a
more authoritarian and repressive order would be the model elsewhere.
Both sides sought stability, but achieving it was quite straightforward for
the Soviets, who outlawed opposition and enforced conformity through
secret police, party-dominated political systems and, on occasion, mili-
tary force. Engineering political stability in the West and among allies
elsewhere was much trickier, for it required more or less voluntary con-
sent, participation, and ultimately elections. That meant reestablishing
democratic political systems in Germany, Japan, and Italy, where de-
mocracy had perished in the 1930s, and reviving viable systems in other
parts of Europe where they had been put in abeyance, compromised, or
violently crushed by the Nazis.
In practice, the key would be putting in place and making legiti-
mate politics and parties that converged near the political center and
avoided extremes of right and left. Parties of the right had been largely
discredited by their association with the ideas of the Nazis or Fascists.
For political systems to work, more moderate center-right parties were
essential. The most successful new ventures would be linked to churches
and inspired by Christian social thought and values. The problem of
creating a stable center-left was equally hard, for liberals and social dem-
ocrats had been persecuted by the extreme right before and during the
war, then later eclipsed by the Communists in the resistance in places
like Italy and France. The Soviet occupation of East Germany ironically
helped to revive the fortunes of the Social Democratic Party in West
Germany, where the German Communist Party would be outlawed. In
France and Italy, by contrast, throughout the postwar years Communists
continued to receive the votes of a good section of the working class. So
long as they did, those parties were excluded from power at the national
level by centrist coalitions that frequently included socialists or social
democrats but that were seldom led by the center-left.
Ensuring political stability required less innovation in the United
States and Britain, for center-left and center-right parties emerged in
8 i n t rodu c t ion

strong positions from the war and early postwar reconstruction. Even in
these countries, stability would be enhanced by moves toward the center
encouraged by the exigencies of the Cold War. Bipartisan agreement on
the need to fight the Cold War provided at least one issue on which Re-
publicans and Democrats could work together. The belief that the US
needed to stay involved globally, to spend the money necessary for that
involvement and for the maintenance of the alliances and multinational
commitments through which the Cold War would be fought came natu-
rally to Democrats and liberal Republicans, but some Republicans re-
sisted. The issue would not be resolved until the party rejected Robert
Taft and nominated Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. Eisenhower’s election
and presidency also marked the moment when Republicans effectively
came to accept the New Deal, although hopes of reversing it continued
to animate the party’s right wing and certain business interests. In Brit-
ain, the Cold War also had a centering effect: Churchill’s Iron Curtain
speech, for example, was regarded by the Attlee government as consis-
tent with its policies; and Bevin’s efforts to take the lead in organizing on
behalf of the Marshall Plan and then NATO were supported by top To-
ries. It was in the shadow of the deepening Cold War that British Con-
servatives reconciled themselves to the achievements of the Labour
governments of 1945–51.
The unprecedented economic boom of the first three decades after
the war contributed massively to political stability in the West. Prosper-
ity seemed to confirm the wisdom of the choices and compromises
made in the early postwar years and reinforced the legitimacy of politi-
cal leaders and party systems. Economic growth was made possible by a
deep structural shift in demand. Depression, the war, and postwar re-
forms, plus the newfound strength of trade unions, brought a redistribu-
tion of income from elites to ordinary workers and consumers. The shift
made it possible for ordinary people to consume more than mere neces-
sities, which in turn encouraged businesses to invest in the technologies
of mass production. The effect was not merely sustained but relatively
equitable growth unique to the history of capitalism. The political effects
could not be anything but beneficial.
Politics was not unruffled. Four issues could have, and to some ex-
tent did, more than ruffle the surface of politics in the first quarter cen-
 i n t rodu c t ion 9

tury after 1945. These were trade and immigration, which were to prove
so destabilizing in subsequent decades, along with decolonization and
the question of race, particularly in the United States. The politics of
trade were clear enough after the war: the United States wanted a more
or less open system of exchange and strongly encouraged others to elim-
inate protections on domestic industries. There was resistance, and those
resisting could easily cite contradictions and inconsistency in the Amer-
ican position, with its protections for agriculture and other industries.
What made it possible to move toward more open arrangements was
economic growth and increasing world trade, which eased the pain for
industries and regions that lost protection. For the most part the issue
was not debated in the US domestic sphere but displaced outward to
negotiations between states and international organizations and upward
from Congress to the president. The effect was that the issue was not
particularly salient until at least the 1980s.
The politics of immigration were also less troublesome and less
salient than they had been or would later become. In the United States,
the relative absence of debate was due primarily to the fact that immi-
gration was already severely restricted by legislation passed in 1924. The
postwar boom would require more workers, but this was achieved by
migration from north to south and from the countryside to the city. The
movement of African Americans from the depressed South to the more
prosperous North would have major effects on those who made the
transition, on the areas affected, and on parties and politics. The effects
were not about immigration per se but rather race, and it seems likely
that if they had been about both at the same time, the consequences
would have been more explosive. In Europe and Japan, immigration did
not become a major source of political conflict because it was mostly
through internal migration that the demand for more labor was satis-
fied. None of this meant that Americans or Europeans had become lib-
eral and tolerant on questions of immigration. It required, after all, only
a modest flow of immigrants from the former colonies to trigger race
riots in Britain. The point, rather, is that for largely accidental reasons
the issues were less important politically than they would later become.
Decolonization was the third issue that could have fueled partisan
divides, divided parties, and disrupted democratic politics. It largely
10 i n t rodu c t ion

did not, though the two major exceptions—Algeria and Indochina—

demonstrated the potential for the battle over colonies to rattle domestic
politics. The French had been determined to restore control over their
empire after 1945 and fought bitterly to do so. They failed to achieve
their goal in Indochina and bequeathed that conflict to the United States
in 1954. The United States would continue to fight in Vietnam and the
effort would elicit mass protests at home that forced Lyndon Johnson
from the White House and came close to tearing the country apart. By
the time the French left Indochina, efforts to win independence for
Algeria were underway and the French fought a nasty war to thwart the
movement. Algeria was closer to France and had a more intimate rela-
tionship with the colonial power, and the French presence there was an-
chored by a substantial population of settlers and backed by supporters
in the military. The political fallout from the insurgency and efforts to
suppress it toppled the Fourth Republic in 1958, bringing De Gaulle
back to power; and when the general decided that the struggle was lost,
it almost got him killed.
Elsewhere, however, decolonization was less destabilizing than it
might have been. For Britain, the key was that almost everyone under-
stood the strategic impossibility of holding onto the empire. The deci-
sions to grant independence to India and to withdraw from Palestine in
1947 prompted few regrets, even from Tory supporters of empire. Brit-
ain was not eager to abandon the rest of its empire so quickly, however,
and conducted brutal counter-insurgency operations in Malaysia and
Kenya. These could well have provoked more controversy, but did not
attract the attention necessary to spark large-scale protests. Britain and
France did join together for one last effort to hold the line against de-
colonization at Suez in 1956. The venture failed utterly and caused the
resignation of the British prime minister, Anthony Eden. That failure
became the signal for a broad retreat. Well before the British and French
had reconciled themselves to loss of empire, Belgium and the Nether-
lands had already been forced to do so. Decolonization was undoubt-
edly the most significant geopolitical transformation between 1945 and
1989—and it produced organizational innovations, like the Bandung
Conference, the Non-Aligned Movement and, within the United Na-
tions, the founding of the UN Conference on Trade and Development
 i n t rodu c t ion 11

(UNCTAD) and the increasing importance of the General Assembly—

but its effects on postwar politics within liberal states were modest.
Race mattered much more, but the political consequences were
mostly confined to the United States. The battle for civil rights for Afri-
can Americans was the most important social and political movement
of its time and its success added up to a second Reconstruction. It led to
a broad-based, if still incomplete, desegregation of American society, as
its workforce, its schools and public institutions, and its culture became
much more integrated. Its crowning legislative achievements were the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Every step
along the way was controversial and provoked a predictable backlash
from white Americans. The political effects reshaped the party system
and the nation’s political geography. What they did not do, ironically,
was to bestow a more or less permanent advantage on either of the two
main parties. The continuing battle over race led many whites in the
South to side with the Republicans while encouraging Black voters to
favor Democrats across the country. With more African Americans mi-
grating from the South to cities in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the
West Coast, the Democratic Party retained or gained strength in these
regions. Overall, the electoral balance remained broadly similar, while
the most notable effect was to make Republicans the party of white
Americans. With this new identity, they effectively chose to recast their
appeal and their program to favor white voters and to disfavor African
Americans and other racial minorities. This was a serious shift that
would become more toxic over time, but not something that threatened
political stability even during the height of the agitation for equal rights.
If the first task of the book is to chart the creation of liberal order
and the second is to investigate the conditions and choices that made it
more or less stable, the final task is to examine and explain what hap-
pened to weaken liberal order. The process began with the economic cri-
sis of the 1970s. The faltering of the economy was due in large part to the
external shocks of the oil crises, but also to the inability of the policies
pursued in the early postwar era to deliver growth at the same level after
the early 1970s. There was also a geopolitical dimension to the disrup-
tion: the inability of Western countries to compel oil producers to sell in
sufficient quantity and at the accustomed price was widely understood as
12 i n t rodu c t ion

a sign of political weakness. Even more important, the difficulty that gov-
ernments had in controlling inflation and regenerating growth seemed
to demonstrate that the political and economic formulas that had shaped
policy since 1945 no longer worked. Existing policies seemed refuted by
events, and the parties and leaders that attempted to make them work
also became discredited.
In response, Thatcher and Reagan pioneered a turn to the right, spe-
cifically a turn away from what had worked for a quarter century and to-
ward a policy framework that relied more exclusively on markets. This
“neoliberal” turn was pushed furthest in Britain and the United States but
affected other countries as well. By 1989, the resulting “Washington Con-
sensus” affected not only domestic economic policy making but had been
accepted as the set of rules by which the international economy operated.
The new paradigm had mixed success. It had been put into place in an effort
to tame inflation, and on that measure it succeeded: inflation was effec-
tively defeated by the mid-1980s. How much the policies of Thatcher and
Reagan contributed is difficult to say, for the early 1980s witnessed the
steepest recession since the Great Depression. When the economy did re-
cover, moreover, it never again approached the rates of growth of the post-
war boom. What did happen was that the postwar settlement—in terms of
the balance between capital and labor, the rich and the poor—was rede-
fined. Social protections were weakened and the gap between rich and poor
began to widen. The liberal order would become less generous as it became
more market-oriented, and what it could offer ordinary people was less at-
tractive. The move benefited parties of the center-right, which dominated
the politics of the 1980s and early 1990s. It also confronted parties of the
center-left with difficult choices: already weakened by structural changes
that were eroding their bases of support, should they embrace or resist the
policies implemented by their opponents?
The turn to markets in the West was not of great consequence for
the East and probably had little effect on the outcome of the Cold War.
The 1980s had begun with a heightening of Cold War tensions and rhet-
oric, but the decade ended with the collapse of “actually existing social-
ism” in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself
in 1991. Socialism failed in these countries largely due to its own flaws.
It could not generate consistent growth in output or living standards,
 i n t rodu c t ion 13

and its draconian policies to compel compliance could not disguise the
illegitimacy of its rule in Eastern Europe or the futility of Soviet efforts
to make the system work. The problems were not accidental or of recent
origin, but built into these systems. When Mikhail Gorbachev opted to
reform the economy and politics of the USSR, and made it clear that the
Soviets would not intervene to prop up the regimes of Eastern Europe,
the end came very quickly.
When the collapse came, it created an opportunity for liberal order,
for capitalism, and for political democracy to extend their reach. The
eastern part of Europe, including the republics of the former Soviet
Union, were all to undergo rapid transitions from command economies
to market economies and from undemocratic to democratic rule. They
were encouraged to do so by the United States and its allies. They were
given some financial support to ease the pain, but the prevalence of
market-oriented policies in the West and in international financial insti-
tutions meant that support was very limited. The result was that progress
toward market economies and political democracy was modest and
accompanied by considerable economic pain and political instability;
and in consequence “democratic backsliding” remained a possibility
throughout the region.
The extension of liberal order was also limited by the unwillingness of
voters in countries like the United States and Britain to support policies to
organize a more stable global order. There was great reluctance, for example,
to get involved in sorting out the bloody conflicts that attended the breakup
of Yugoslavia. Over time a rather weak consensus emerged that the United
States and its allies, possibly working through the United Nations or at least
through NATO, should be willing to undertake “humanitarian interven-
tion” in places where local rulers threatened the lives and rights of citizens.
This consensus evaporated quickly, as its consequences became clearer and
as other powers objected to interference in what they regarded as their
spheres of influence. What had appeared as a great opportunity for liberal
order to expand and put in place a more liberal world of states had become,
by the late 1990s and early 2000s, a controversial undertaking with uncer-
tain results.
The end of the Cold War also had unforeseen results in domestic poli-
tics as well as in the level of public support for the spread and maintenance
14 i n t rodu c t ion

of liberal order. It became clear that in retrospect the Cold War had served
as a glue that kept political parties, particularly on the right, attached to the
center. Without the Cold War, center-right parties in numerous countries
moved further to the right and certain parties that had been dominant for
much of the postwar era, like the Christian Democrats in Italy and the Lib-
eral Democrats in Japan, fell apart. Politics became less predictable and less
solidly grounded, including in the United States and Britain. At the same
time, the appeal of what has been labeled market fundamentalism began to
fade as memories of the 1970s became dimmer. By the 1990s, the crusade to
liberate animal spirits and unleash rapid growth had been replaced, it
seemed, by a more mean-spirited refusal to raise taxes and by blunt efforts
to rein in entitlements. With the attractions of market-based policies wan-
ing, parties and leaders on the right began to flirt with other issues—extreme
nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the various causes summed up
by the phrase “culture wars”—to win votes. It was a dangerous move, and it
would only get worse after 2000.
The weakened foundations of liberal order and democratic stabil-
ity would be fully on display after the turn of the millennium, when
novel challenges arose and enduring problems became more formida-
ble. There were external challenges: the increasing resistance to and de-
clining appetite for humanitarian intervention; the attacks of 9/11 and
America’s blundering and destructive response; Russia’s turn to authori-
tarianism and toward a more revanchist foreign policy, especially in its
“near abroad”; and the rise of China economically and politically. The
Great Recession, which began in 2008 and persisted for several years,
was not exclusively an external shock or challenge, but it was global in
scope and represented a setback for the economic policies pursued in
the West, especially the United States, and reinforced the external chal-
lenges to liberal order.
These were accompanied by internal challenges, although the fact
that they happened in many countries more or less simultaneously sug-
gests connections across borders, at least in terms of causes. The starting
point here were the asymmetrical shifts in the politics of left and right.
The center-left had for decades been confronted with an erosion of sup-
port from its previously solid bases of support: the working class and
trade unions. Structural changes in the economy and in technology were
 i n t rodu c t ion 15

more important causes of this than the actual behavior or policies of

particular parties, but policy was not always responsive. What center-left
parties did do, and fairly effectively, was to try to attract voters from
other social groups—professionals, minorities, and working women—
by incorporating the issues they cared about into party programs and
policies. Overall, this meant an effort to enlarge their appeal while re-
maining attached to the political center. Parties on the right, by contrast,
chose explicitly to abandon the center, and the ending of the Cold War
facilitated that choice. A commitment to market-oriented politics was
common to most (though not all) parties and movements of the right,
but to that would now be added more unsavory appeals to nationalism,
traditional values, and antipathy to immigrants, especially Muslims and,
by a curious extension, to the European Union in certain parts of Eu-
rope. The result was a surge of populist, and frequently authoritarian,
parties across Europe.
The move toward populism, and its antipathies and grievances,
also occurred in Britain and the United States. In Britain, it took the
form of Euroscepticism, which meant not so much skepticism toward
Europe as open hostility. It would take almost three decades for this
stance to take over the Conservative Party, and it required the formation
of a separate party, UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence Party),
with its own charismatic leader, Nigel Farage, to make it a reality. The
decisive moment came with the Brexit referendum of 2016, which was
won by the “Leave” supporters. Republicans in America had been mov-
ing to the right since the election of Ronald Reagan, if not earlier. They
were aided from the 1990s by the growth of a uniquely effective right-
wing media environment. Though they faced the same problem crafting
a convincing appeal to voters as other right-wing parties committed to
market fundamentalism and austerity, they were more willing to invoke
the culture wars to attract support. Their efforts would get a major boost
with the election of Barack Obama. The reality of a Black president pro-
voked immediate hostility from whites, who were told, or understood
already, that demographic trends were loosening their grip on the levers
of power and threatening their privileges. Donald Trump’s first serious
foray into national politics in 2011 built on and played to this hostility
by questioning Obama’s citizenship.
16 i n t rodu c t ion

In his run for the presidency, Trump would give prominence to

two further divisive issues: immigration and trade. Republicans had
been ambivalent about both before Trump, but Trump was not inhibited
by any commitment to ideological principles. He had no difficulty de-
nouncing Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers and proposed
to build a wall to keep them out; and he promised a trade war, or a series
of trade wars—they were “easy to win,” he claimed—to get not only Chi-
na but also America’s allies to agree to measures to erase America’s trade
deficit. What Trump managed to do was to combine the negative parti-
sanship of most Republicans with more populist appeals to racial ani-
mosity, anti-immigrant sentiment, resentment of foreigners, and fears of
foreign competition. It took a political newcomer, an outsider, to make it
work, for more “mainstream” Republicans had past commitments that
made it impossible fully to embrace Trump’s message. Also, they could
not claim his outsider status and were unwilling or unable to puncture
the myths he wove about his career as a successful businessman. Nor
could they match the hours of free publicity Trump got from his outra-
geous pronouncements. All these factors produced Trump’s limited, but
in the end decisive, success in the 2016 election. He would not win the
support of a majority of Americans, losing the popular vote to Hillary
Clinton by close to 3 million, but he scored enough victories in closely
contested states to prevail in the Electoral College.
The 2016 votes represented dramatic turns, proving that liberal or-
der was never inevitable, only superficially stable, always a matter of
choice and political will. The study ends with a very quick look at poli-
tics after 2016, partly to determine whether what seemed ominous at the
time has proved to be as bad as feared—or even worse—and partly to
assess the state of liberal order and democracy and the threats to both
after Trump, after Brexit, and after the invasion of Ukraine.
 Conclusion
Fragmentation, Democracy, and Liberal Order

The Long View

T
he votes for Brexit and for Trump in 2016 were dramatic
ruptures, clear breaks from three-quarters of a century of
political history. The impacts will be clear only in the long
term. The analysis laid out in this book suggests, however, that
neither outcome was quite as aberrant and unpredictable as first reactions
implied. The vote against Europe was unexpected when it occurred, but
consistent with a lengthy tradition of British unease about its ties to the
European continent. Trump was not the first demagogue to attract a large
following in the United States, nor were his appeals to race and xenopho-
bia previously unheard of.1 He was the only such figure who managed to
ride these sentiments to the presidency, but they were familiar features
of the dark side of American history. The traditions that produced
Brexit and Trump never went away in either country, but they were
eclipsed beginning in the 1940s and remained at bay until roughly the
1990s. Their revival since drove the victories of Brexit and Trump; and
populists elsewhere, relying on comparable traditions and sentiments,
had success as well. The precondition for this breakthrough was the
lengthy process by which parties and political systems in Britain, Amer-
ica, and other Western nations became effectively detached from the
political center, less secure and less firmly rooted.

283
284 C onclu sion

Put differently, a measure of the effectiveness of liberal order inter-

nationally and of liberal democratic politics domestically was their abil-
ity to keep the kinds of sentiments that Brexit and Trump and populism
played upon confined to the margins for so long. Liberal order had been
the rule in international relations in the West since the 1940s, and then
more widely after 1989, and democratic political systems functioned
with minor disturbances for a prolonged period. That era lasted long
enough to make liberal order and political democracy appear normal
and natural and to obscure from view the considerable difficulties that
attended the creation of liberal order in the 1940s and the establishment
of viable political systems in the West and Japan. Also obscured were the
challenges that had to be confronted internationally and at home in
maintaining liberal order and functioning democracies throughout the
postwar era. Large sections of this study have been devoted to clarifying
what was previously obscure in order to reveal not just the sources of
stability in the system but also its vulnerabilities. Understanding what
made things work after the Second World War shows that whatever
stability was achieved—and stability is a relative term—the project was
never assured and needed constant tending.
If the duration of liberal order and democratic politics made it dif-
ficult to appreciate the achievement, the erosion of the conditions sus-
taining both was also not obvious until it was well underway. The
economic troubles of the 1970s got the attention they deserved, as did
the inability of governments using the tools and ideas at hand to cope.
The resulting turn away from the state toward the embrace of the market
was also visible enough and well chronicled. The implications of the
neoliberal turn for liberal order and democratic stability would, how-
ever, not be visible for some time. The resumption of at least modest
growth after the steep recession of the early 1980s diverted attention
from the corrosive effects of market fundamentalism. Its policy tri-
umphs tore up the social compact—the expanded commitment to social
provision or the welfare state, the limits on what business could and
could not do, a reasonably fair and redistributive system of taxation, and
a balance between the rights of labor and capital—that made prosperity
shared and politics more stable from the late 1940s into the 1970s. Crit-
ics of neoliberalism may have predicted negative consequences, but it
 C onclu sion 285

required a couple of decades for those consequences to be registered

decisively.
Before that, liberalism and liberal order secured a historic victory
over socialism and authoritarianism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union. The end of the Cold War was undoubtedly a vindication of lib-
eral democracy and capitalism. It can plausibly be argued that the capi-
talism that had prevailed in the Cold War was not the market-oriented
variety recently in vogue and on offer in 1989. Rather, it was the variant
of reformed and constrained capitalism that had generated growth and
steadily rising living standards during les trente glorieuses that decided
the contest between capitalism and Soviet-style socialism. It was capital-
ism nonetheless, and to insist on this distinction in 1989, or in the de-
cade that followed, would have been seen as churlish and would not
have made much difference, particularly since economic growth accel-
erated further during the 1990s and globalization, whose locally devas-
tating side effects would emerge only over time, advanced rapidly as
well. The post–Cold War order was in fact a victory for liberal order, for
capitalism, and for democracy, which extended their global reach and
became established in places where socialism had produced economic
stagnation, where democracy was largely unknown, and where interna-
tional order had meant being locked into a bloc held together by force
and repression.2 The victory was inevitably incomplete and subject to
reversal, and the prospects for further expanding liberal order and dem-
ocratic rule would soon diminish, but the achievement was real and
gave the appearance that the new order was likely stable and secure.
It would turn out to be neither, for it would confront serious exter-
nal challenges after 2000, and internal developments in democratic po-
litical systems would render them fragile, leaving governments and
leaders incapable of responding creatively to a new world. Even during
the 1990s, if not before, the center had begun to weaken politically.
Center-left parties had to reorient themselves as their previous bases of
support atrophied. As these parties sought to attract and cement con-
nections with new constituencies, they remained committed to the po-
litical center. On the center-right, by contrast, parties abandoned the
center ground and moved further to the right. Part of the reason
was that market liberalism offered little besides austerity and tax cuts to
286 C onclu sion

voters, and conservative politicians responded by courting them with

appeals to nationalism, resentment of immigrants and foreigners, and
the culture wars. The right’s willingness to move away from the political
center was also facilitated by the end of the Cold War, for it had been the
need to fight the Cold War that had pushed many conservatives to adopt
more centrist positions, both on the economy and on questions of civil
and social rights. With the Cold War won and done, compromise and
moderation were not so necessary. The weakening of the political center,
already in progress since the 1980s, would advance much further in the
first decade and a half of the new century. Issues like terrorism, the role
of Islam in the West, and immigration would gain increased saliency,
and a new, more polarized media environment pushed right-wing par-
ties further to the right and led them to adopt a more populist tone and
appeal. The center-left continued to make gains among professionals,
ethnic minorities, and women, but center-left parties remained coali-
tions of interests and therefore hard to manage and keep together.
The shifting character of politics in democratic systems made
those systems vulnerable. So, too, did the nature of the external difficul-
ties they faced. The first and perhaps most difficult was the matter of
dealing with the causes and consequences of 9/11, as parties and leaders
argued over the appropriate response and adopted policies that were
largely ineffective or counterproductive. Less immediately pressing
but equally resistant to easy solutions were the open challenges to lib-
eral order, and to democracy, from Russia and China. While the conse-
quences of these shifts in the global order were still unfolding, the Great
Recession hit in 2008, depriving the advocates of liberal order and lib-
eral politics of the most powerful argument in their repertoire: the claim
that liberal capitalism was an engine of growth and prosperity. The re-
cession cut deep, destroying businesses and further hollowing out the
manufacturing sector in the developed West, and recovery was slow
and painful. The inequality that had been increasing since the 1980s got
much worse and its victims became further detached from prior politi-
cal loyalties and open to more demagogic appeals. Political entrepre-
neurs like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, like populists across Europe,
saw the opportunity and prospered in just about every country. Their
breakthrough victories came in 2016, with the “yes” vote prevailing in
 C onclu sion 287

the Brexit referendum in June and Trump winning the presidential elec-
tion in November.

After 2016
What made the shocking choices of 2016 so important was where they
occurred. It had been worrying to see turns toward authoritarianism in
Russia and in Turkey, but not entirely surprising. So, too, in Brazil. Nor
were the triumphs of authoritarian populists in Hungary and Poland
entirely unexpected. It was disappointing to note that China’s further
integration into the global economy was not accompanied by any loos-
ening of the grip of the Chinese Communist Party, but it was always a
stretch to believe that it would. More troubling was the turn to populist
parties and leaders in Western Europe, but the fragmentation of Italian
and French politics was more or less structural and provided space for
such movements to gain a foothold. The nations of Western Europe also
confronted the same forces that weakened the hold of the political cen-
ter as were operative elsewhere—rising inequality, strained and less gen-
erous social protections, and the erosion of previously secure jobs in
industry. These issues combined with resentment against immigrants,
Muslim immigrants in particular, to create conditions in which populist
appeals attracted support.
When right-wing and rhetorically populist movements like
Brexit and leaders like Trump won elections in 2016, they triumphed in
the two countries that had been central to the prolonged effort to
create and sustain a liberal international order. Britain and the United
States also boasted the longest histories of successful democracy, always
flawed but functioning steadily and gradually improving. For right-wing
populism to suddenly prevail in Britain and America was to demon-
strate that it could succeed anywhere; and because of the outsized
role played by these countries, the United States most importantly, in
making and maintaining liberal order and promoting democratic gov-
ernance, the liberal international order would in consequence become
weaker and democracy more fragile. Whatever happened after 2016,
serious damage to liberal order and to liberal democracy had already
been done.
288 C onclu sion

The politics of Brexit after the referendum was, in fact, a bizarre

parody of normal politics, and the Trump administration was a chaotic
mess with but a single legislative accomplishment—a tax cut that utterly
contradicted its populist appeals and promises—along with often brutal
and poorly crafted executive orders that were routinely blocked by the
courts and that would mostly not survive a new administration. Never-
theless, the effects of these moments of right-wing populist dominance
were real and would have consequences.
The saga of Brexit after the referendum was pathetic and humor-
ous and troubling, all at the same time. The vote prompted David Cam-
eron, who had called it and lost it, to resign as prime minister. He would
be succeeded by Theresa May, a lackluster party loyalist who declared on
assuming power that “Brexit means Brexit.” That in itself meant little, for
Brexit remained to be defined, but it did make it unlikely that it could be
reversed and gave the upper hand in shaping it to those most keen for a
clean break. It did not prevent more than three years of parliamentary
wrangling over the terms of Brexit, and another year of bargaining with
the European Union. May herself would not survive the process. She
made a huge error by calling a general election in June 2017. Her hope-
ful assumption was that the promise of “strong and steady leadership”
would give her a big majority over Labour and leverage over the Brexit
fanatics in her own party. The assumption was really a gamble, and she
lost. Labour, which had trailed badly in the polls, somehow managed to
fudge the question of Brexit and instead offered a program to end aus-
terity. The result was that May lost her majority and was forced to rely on
the backing of Britain’s most retrograde party, the Ulster Unionists
(DUP). Rather than being strengthened in Parliament, she was crippled.
Under May’s leadership the Tories would be bested by pro-Brexit forces
in the European elections of May 2019, and she was compelled to resign
shortly after. Boris Johnson was selected as party leader and took over as
prime minister in late July. Amiable and unprincipled, Johnson prom-
ised to finish Brexit, and on that basis fought the general election of
December 2019. Labour, deluded by its success two years earlier, en-
dured a catastrophic loss. Brexit would happen, though another year
would pass before Britain secured a provisional trade deal with the Eu-
ropean Union.
 C onclu sion 289

The practical impact of the Brexit decision was likely to be mixed,

with more negative than positive results. By choosing to leave the group-
ing of European countries, Britain was reducing its role and impact on
the world. For a while it seemed possible that other member countries,
with their own inevitable grievances, might follow the British example
and leave, or threaten to leave, the EU. It did not happen, as European
countries presented a united front in dealings with the UK. The coali-
tion that supported Brexit had many factions and preferences, but a core
group of Thatcherite enthusiasts believed that Britain should and would
become a kind of Singapore on the Thames, competing with low taxes
and few regulations and pushing for free trade all around. Johnson’s
populist pitch, and the Conservatives’ need to preserve the gains they
made in 2019 in the “red wall” of seats in older industrial areas in the
north and Midlands, presumably preclude that option, but Britain will
struggle economically whatever the government’s policy choices. All se-
rious predictions foretell economic loss from Brexit, though it will be
difficult to distinguish losses due to Brexit from those stemming from
the COVID-19 pandemic. In terms of domestic politics, Brexit made the
Conservative Party into the Brexit party, reinforcing the move toward
populism. Will the Tories thrive with that new identity? It seems ques-
tionable, particularly given the erratic character of Boris Johnson. What
seems more possible, if not yet likely, is that Brexit will convince the
Scots to hold another referendum on independence. Such sentiments
could also grow in Wales; and Brexit could unsettle many things in Ire-
land. Overall, the British decision to leave the European Union has, and
will continue to have, its main effects within the United Kingdom. It has
had, and presumably will have, only modest effects internationally.
Trump’s election would have far greater impact, though his inter-
ventions were too scattered and erratic to have the decisive effects that
his supporters wanted and that so many others feared.3 The most im-
mediate change was in the tone and rhetoric of foreign policy, which
ordinarily proceeds with pledges of friendship and common goals be-
fore getting down to negotiating the testy matters on which states differ.
Trump reversed that, putting anger and threats first before, more often
than not, backing down on specifics. He attacked longtime allies in
NATO and questioned the usefulness of the alliance before acquiescing
290 C onclu sion

to minor policy changes and reaffirming US security commitments. The

administration was also prone to bluster, issuing threats to obliterate
North Korea—before Trump decided he was in love with its dictator—
and getting little in return. More generally, Trump could be counted
upon to do, or at least to say, pretty much the opposite of what Obama
had said and done. The most obvious case was Russia: the Obama ad-
ministration had been sharply critical of Russia over its intervention in
Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea and had imposed tough sanc-
tions. Trump, deciding that he trusted Vladimir Putin more than his
own intelligence and foreign policy advisors, indicated that he wanted to
lift sanctions. He did not manage to do that, but he tried.
The Trump administration also softened or abandoned American
criticism of authoritarian rulers and regimes: of Duterte in the Philip-
pines, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Erdoğan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary and
his counterparts in Poland, el-Sisi in Egypt and, most shamefully, the
Saudis. Whether the new US attitude mattered much, and whether it
further empowered these rulers and governments to behave worse than
they otherwise would have, is difficult to say, but it is obvious that the
United States under Trump did little or nothing to promote democracy
anywhere. Aside from rhetoric, Trump’s achievements were mainly neg-
ative. He renounced the Paris Climate Agreement, pulled back from the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, took the United States out of the Iran nuclear
deal in 2018, and opted out of the World Health Organization in the
middle of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. None of these moves led to
the collapse of the agreements, but they did signal that the Trump ad-
ministration was not interested in maintaining the multilateral coopera-
tion, alliances, and institutions through which a rules-based, liberal
international order must work. The Trump administration also signed
up to a very bad deal with the Taliban in February 2020, though the fall
of the Afghan government would happen during his successor’s tenure.
A central feature of liberal order has been economic openness. It is
on this issue that the Trump administration had the greatest effects, but
its efforts were not terribly productive. Though Trump insisted on with-
drawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement, the substitute
arrangement negotiated with Canada and Mexico made few changes.
The threat to impose tariffs on allies, including Canada, was mostly not
 C onclu sion 291

followed up; and when it was, the administration’s measures were rid-
dled with exceptions and reversals. The recourse to protection against
China was more consistent, but the policy did little to redress the bal-
ance of trade with China, and it led to higher prices for consumers, in-
cluding businesses. Businesses have felt compelled to think about
reconfiguring their supply chains with key links in China, but do not
seem likely to relocate operations back to the United States. Vietnam,
Bangladesh, Mexico, and other low-wage economies offer better pros-
pects. It is likely that the shift in policy toward China and trade will
continue beyond Trump, but policies pursued together with allies would
seem to offer a much better chance of success.4 The problem is that
Trump’s legacy might well render multilateral approaches more difficult.
At home, Trump’s record was weak on substance, if dramatic in
presentation. Outrageous tweets became a substitute for policy. The ad-
ministration’s most significant legislative accomplishment was the Tax
Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. It was one of the most unpopular bills ever to
be passed by Congress, mainly because roughly 80 percent of its benefits
went to the top 1 percent. Republicans barely mentioned it during the
2018 midterms, in which they experienced massive losses. Trump also
promised legislation on health care: he pledged to replace the Affordable
Care Act (Obamacare) with a much better system. Republicans came
close to securing repeal but failed, and they never got around to putting
forward an alternative. “Infrastructure week” became a joke. With few
legislative achievements, Trump chose instead to make policy through
executive orders. These were plentiful and covered just about every ma-
jor policy area, but most were so poorly drafted that they were blocked
permanently by the courts or had to be seriously modified to withstand
judicial scrutiny. Among those that survived, many have been or will be
reversed by the Biden administration. Potentially the most damaging
would likely be those that have allowed businesses to pollute by dump-
ing or drilling or making unsafe or less fuel-efficient products, though
many companies, looking further ahead, will have been wary about tak-
ing advantage of Trump’s deregulating initiatives when they were un-
likely to last.5 Trump’s executive orders do fit, of course, into a long
history of efforts to cripple the government’s ability to police the behav-
ior of businesses and to protect the environment. In that sense, Steve
292 C onclu sion

Bannon’s pronounced desire to work toward the “deconstruction of the

administrative state” was merely an update on prior efforts to “starve the
beast,” with more than a touch of added venom and paranoia.6
The balance sheet of Trump’s few domestic accomplishments,
through legislation or executive orders, added up to a largely ineffective
presidency. Such a traditional measure, however, does not offer anything
like an adequate assessment of his impact on the country and its politi-
cal life.7 Trump’s election in 2016 was a product of Republicans’ long
march to the right on policy; of his and the party’s willingness to make
appeals on the basis of racial, ethnic, and religious identity; of their re-
lentless focus on culture war issues; of efforts to build on and make use
of a history of attempts to control the rules of the electoral game, main-
ly by making it more difficult for nonwhites to vote; and of appointing
conservative justices to the courts. To this rather toxic brew Trump
brought explicit contempt for women, for immigrants and foreigners,
for his political opponents, and for the media, at least those reporters,
broadcasters, and newspapers that chose to question him. Trump as
president also imported into the center of government the routine prac-
tice of lying. All this eroded the norms and customs that have been, and
continue to be, essential in maintaining democracy.8 Trump also chose
to populate his administration with people who were very rich, had little
experience or competence, and were often plainly corrupt. If and when
any of his team showed a hint of independence, he turned on them—
and they were soon gone. There had been hope early on in the adminis-
tration that there were enough “adults in the room,” typically military
men, to restrain Trump’s worst impulses. They were only partially suc-
cessful, and over time they would be replaced by more pliant—indeed,
sycophantic—characters.
The purpose behind such practices did not appear to be a desire to
advance a program or ideology, for Trump had no set of stable ideas.
The effect, though, was to further the agenda of the Republican right and
to embed their views in government, particularly in the judiciary.
Trump’s purpose, it seems, was mostly to aggrandize himself and to gar-
ner as much power and attention as possible. It began with transpar-
ently false claims about the size of the crowd at his inauguration and
absurd arguments about how he had really won the popular vote, insist-
 C onclu sion 293

ing that Clinton’s popular majority was due to illegal votes. The political
battle over the completely justified Russia investigation provoked the
president to new efforts to assert his authority, most notably by firing the
head of the FBI. When that led to the appointment of a special prosecu-
tor and a lengthy inquiry, Trump not only did his best to obstruct
justice—as the Mueller Report documented in detail—but also decided
to cast himself as the victim of the “deep state” and to do whatever pos-
sible to purge the government of officials insufficiently loyal to him.9
Where possible, he also sought to use the state for his personal enrich-
ment and to advance his boundless political ambition.
The effort to get American taxpayers to make money for the presi-
dent, his family, and his businesses meant endless bookings of govern-
ment events at Trump properties and encouraging foreign leaders and
emissaries to do the same. It also meant promoting his daughter’s brands
and doing what he could to help family members, like Jared Kushner,
with their own financial troubles. Odd behavior for someone who had
promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington. Rather more important
for the long term was Trump’s effort to use his position to keep himself
in power. He reportedly asked China to buy more agricultural products
to help his reelection, for example, and sought to extract policy pro-
nouncements and decisions from foreigners to advance his interests.10
The boldest attempt to use the powers at his disposal to advance his nar-
row political interests came with Trump’s pressure on Ukraine in 2019.
It was the cause of his first impeachment. Trump tried to hold up essen-
tial military aid approved by Congress to force Ukraine to investigate
Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son, and Joe Biden himself.
Whistleblowers inside the government, in the National Security Coun-
cil and the CIA, leaked the text of the phone call from Trump to the
Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Congress investigated and
voted to impeach the US president. The Senate chose not to dismiss
Trump, but there was little doubt of his guilt. Shortly after the Senate
vote on February 5, 2020, Trump proceeded to enact another purge of
officials he regarded as disloyal.
As the Senate was debating Trump’s fate, news began to trickle in
about a previously unknown and quite lethal virus that had broken out in
December 2019 in Wuhan, China. Coping with this new coronavirus and
294 C onclu sion

the illness it caused, COVID-19, was the first serious challenge of Trump’s
presidency. For three years Trump had been very lucky: he had inherited
an economic recovery from the previous administration, and the tax cuts
of 2017 helped to keep it going; there had been extremely destructive
hurricanes and wildfires to which Trump responded ineffectively, but he
managed to avoid taking the blame; and the absence of serious interna-
tional crises meant that Trump’s efforts to disrupt the international order
had less effect than they might have had if circumstances had been differ-
ent. The coronavirus, which by March had become a global pandemic,
put an end to Trump’s good fortune and threatened his reelection.11 It
need not have done so. Other leaders, in the United States and abroad,
were seen to respond effectively to the virus and became more popular
with voters. Trump, by contrast, responded in perhaps the worst possible
way. His first reaction was to deny the severity of the disease, claiming
that the United States had few cases and that its spread would be con-
trolled and at the same time blaming China for exporting the virus. The
president famously told the journalist Bob Woodward that he deliber-
ately played down the seriousness of the virus and the accompanying
health crisis.12 He then, very briefly, decided to take it seriously and began
to advocate a national lockdown, but he left state and local leaders to do
the actual work of combatting the disease. Trump presided over short-
ages of medical equipment—ventilators and PPE (personal protective
equipment)—and tests, leaving local officials, businesses, doctors and
hospitals, and the public to fend for themselves. The result was that in the
first year of the pandemic the United States suffered more cases and more
deaths than any other country, rich or poor.
The pandemic brought with it economic collapse, as businesses
were forced to close for safety reasons and as people stopped shopping
in person and eating out. Restaurants and bars, sports facilities and
gyms, theaters and museums closed, as did many schools and colleges.
Unemployment rose rapidly. Trump, fearing that the disruption to the
economy would weaken his reelection prospects, soon shifted his posi-
tion and began to call for lifting lockdown measures only recently, and
belatedly, imposed. He actually held out the prospect of reopening by
Easter of 2020. With the virus spreading more or less uncontrolled, that
was impossible, but a few businesses started up again in May and more
 C onclu sion 295

did so in June. The move was grossly irresponsible—a summer of re-

opening was followed by an autumn of rising infections. This second
surge was not confined to the coasts, which had been hit hardest in the
spring, but was more widely dispersed. By November, rates of infection
were highest in the Dakotas, despite their sparse populations spread out
over vast expanses of territory. The argument over reopening became
increasingly polarized and nasty, with Trump urging his followers to
blame state governors for imposing restrictions on economic activity
and social gatherings that could spread the virus and to demand that
they “liberate Michigan,” or Wisconsin, or wherever they found them-
selves. It also led to disagreement between the administration and public
health authorities who resisted Trump’s early moves to declare that the
virus was dying out, that businesses could safely reopen, or that social
distancing and the use of face masks were unnecessary. As health profes-
sionals spoke out, Trump attacked them, proposing untested, ineffective,
or even dangerous remedies, and turning for advice to people who
lacked expertise in infectious diseases. He appointed Dr. Scott Atlas—a
fellow at the Hoover Institution, Fox News commentator, former profes-
sor of neuroradiology, and advisor to Rudy Giuliani’s presidential cam-
paign in 2008—as a special advisor, for example, in order to counter the
influence of more widely recognized experts like Anthony Fauci. Attack-
ing experts was nothing new for Trump or for his followers or for Fox
News, but it was dangerous.
As the pandemic brought devastation to the nation’s health and its
economy, Americans also witnessed yet another reckoning with racial
discrimination. On May 25, George Floyd was killed during an arrest in
Minneapolis. A police officer knelt on his neck for over nine minutes
while Floyd kept saying, “I can’t breathe,” and begged for relief. Three
other policemen stood by, preventing onlookers from intervening. The
event was recorded. People all over the country soon saw what had hap-
pened, and by the very next day protests erupted in the city. They quick-
ly spread to roughly two thousand cities under the banner of Black Lives
Matter. Most protests and protesters were nonviolent and, at least ini-
tially, opinion polls were strongly in favor and also showed support for
reforming the police. As is normal with such large-scale social move-
ments, there was occasional violence. Some was provoked by protesters,
296 C onclu sion

some occurred when protesters confronted police, and some was car-
ried out by opponents of the protesters seeking to discredit their actions.
The Trump administration reacted by invoking “law and order” and,
here and there, by sending in troops or federal agents. Protests and mi-
nor violence continued through the summer and even into the fall, but
Trump’s efforts to use the federal government for what was routinely the
work of local and state police elicited resistance from mayors, governors,
and even from the military and the secretary of defense. The political
effect of the Black Lives Matter protests was difficult to assess, for the
early support the movement received was dissipated to some extent by
continued violence and, it has been argued, by demands to “defund the
police.” The phrase and the demand, supporters asserted, were not
meant literally, but were a way of saying that more resources should be
directed at efforts to reform the police and to employ people trained to
handle mental health crises and to manage confrontations. Trump and
his allies insisted on taking the demand literally, using it to justify their
emphasis on establishing law and order by supporting the police.
What mattered most for the presidential election of 2020, it seems
clear, was the coronavirus pandemic and Trump’s ineffective handling of
it. The progress of the disease was relentless, and however much Trump
and the administration sought to play it down and hope that it would
disappear, it did not. The effect was not merely to undo the economic suc-
cess that Trump hoped would be his main claim to a second term, but to
further erode his credibility and to undermine his regular boasts. His op-
ponent, Joe Biden, took the virus seriously and acted as public health of-
ficials urged—wearing a mask, social distancing, and urging the public to
do likewise. He campaigned from home and eschewed the sort of in-
person, and largely maskless, rallies that Trump craved. The Trump cam-
paign engaged in the same personal attacks that it had used on previous
opponents, but they were less effective against a familiar and nonthreat-
ening candidate like Biden. As these attacks failed, the Trump campaign
followed the predictable path of trying to garner support by appealing to
fear, based largely upon race, and on familiar culture war issues. These
efforts proved to be insufficient, and Trump lost by a solid margin. Biden’s
victory was not a rout, particularly in light of the solid performance of
Republicans in Congress, but it was a decisive rejection of Trump.
 C onclu sion 297

As Trump contemplated the possibility of defeat, he began to make

the argument that the election was rigged, that the only way he could
lose would be if the election was stolen. This pitch, too, was predictable,
for he had said much the same thing in 2016, when he assumed he would
lose. But he obviously enjoyed winning more and, having tasted the per-
quisites of office, was not eager to relinquish them. The effect was a pro-
longed, ungracious, and frankly undemocratic effort to refuse to accept
the results of the election and to overturn it. It required the promulga-
tion of what has rightly been called “the big lie”—that the election had
been stolen from Trump—and culminated in the January 6 riot at the
Capitol. Nothing so effectively symbolized the dark side of Trump and
his presidency as the way he chose to leave it. The political effects of the
failed effort cannot be good, but it is impossible to predict if they will be
lasting. The behavior was certainly of a piece with the Trump record
before his election and during his term as president; and the acceptance
of the “big lie” by many Republicans was consistent with the party’s new-
found loyalty to Trump and its contempt for voters who might disagree.

Liberal Order and Democracy, Reassessed

Efforts to establish a liberal international order enjoyed two great mo-
ments of successful expansion. The first came in the decade or so after the
Second World War, when democracy was established in Western Europe
and Japan. Though its reach was confined, it was maintained for a long
time and accompanied by a shared prosperity. The second moment oc-
curred after the end of the Cold War, when the reach of the liberal order
was extended, becoming more global, as democracies and market econo-
mies were established in what had been the Soviet bloc and in a number of
non-Western countries. The prior wave of democratization that began in
the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America, Africa, and Asia meant that by the
early 2000s at least formal democratic rule was in place more widely than
ever before; and more countries and peoples participated in the world
market than had ever done so before, even if the benefits were distributed
unequally. Liberal order, internationally and domestically, had been limit-
ed and qualified until the 1990s; after that, limits were extended; qualifica-
tions were still in order, but perhaps not forever. There were even hopes
298 C onclu sion

that integration into the world economy and engagement with interna-
tional institutions, the law, and civil society in the world of liberal order
and liberal democracy would erode the isolation and repression that char-
acterized China and illiberal systems elsewhere. It would not happen, but
for a brief moment it seemed conceivable at least, if not quite likely.
The two decades since have been rather sobering for advocates of
liberal order and the promotion of democracy. The grand hopes of the
early post–Cold War period have not been realized, and setbacks have
been far more frequent than advances. The events of 9/11, and their
bloody aftermath, demonstrated with brutal clarity that large sections of
the world were not pining for democracy or the liberal, mostly secular,
culture of the West. They showed, too, the limits of the kinds of power—
military and economic—wielded by the United States and its allies.
With Putin’s rise to power, Russia chose a path quite different from
that envisioned by its Western advisors after the Soviet collapse: its vari-
ant of capitalism turned out to be highly unequal and based not so much
on manufacturing and services as on resource extraction, never a recipe
for equity or the nurturing of a democratic culture; and it decided to
reclaim its position as a great power in opposition to the perceived he-
gemonic aspirations of the United States. China pushed forward with
rates of economic growth seldom seen and has sought an international
and geopolitical role commensurate with its enhanced economic status.
And lastly, economic failure stripped the United States and its closest
allies of what had been the most compelling argument for their vision of
global order, market-oriented economic policies, and democratic gover-
nance. Failure was manifest most obviously in the Great Recession, but
also in the slow and uneven growth that followed and the rising levels of
inequality that accompanied it.
Severe hits to liberal order and liberal democracy have also come
from within, as illiberal policies and politicians gained increasing sup-
port. Right-wing populism took root and spread across the advanced
democracies, putting into question the commitment to democracy itself.
Until 2016, the most serious turns toward illiberalism had come in Hun-
gary and Poland, but the electoral shocks of 2016 in the UK and the US
were more dramatic and arguably of greater consequence. The success
of the Brexit referendum meant that a founder and pillar of the liberal
 C onclu sion 299

international order had chosen to opt out of the organization that helped
to define Europe as liberal and democratic. Trump’s election victory was
a triumph of an extremely toxic type of populism—market-oriented or
neoliberal in economics but nationalist, racist, and socially conservative
in its appeal, a kind of “plutocratic populism.”13 It was also an authoritar-
ian populism, limited in its ambition mainly by its leader’s incoherence
and short attention span.
The recent threats to liberal order internationally and to liberal de-
mocracy domestically mean that talk of liberal order and its prospects
needs to be coupled with a frank recognition of its limits and contradic-
tions, of progress and backsliding. Rather than speaking of liberal
order as something that was once established, then extended, and is now
threatened—a familiar story of rise and fall—it makes more sense to re-
gard the efforts to create and sustain a liberal international order and to
advance liberal democratic politics within states as a continual quest. As a
corollary, when examining and assessing those periods when liberalism
has appeared to be the norm, it has proved essential to probe more deeply
and explore the conditions that made it possible and allowed it to be seen
as normal and natural. The basic lessons to be learned are that the efforts
to bring about liberal order and liberal democracy were routinely hard,
the results impermanent and hardly normative, even when they seemed
to be stable and enduring, and that the successes of the liberal project
required specific historical conditions that will not be replicated.
Those conditions—in the 1940s and the 1990s—were unique. Imag-
ining that they, or something very similar, will recur is delusional. Absent
the circumstances that enabled earlier liberal advances, the prospects for
restoring support for liberal order or extending and deepening democra-
cy will undoubtedly be more limited. Of necessity, any such efforts must
be built on a recognition of the altered geopolitical landscape and present
economic, social, and political realities. The question then becomes a mat-
ter of figuring out what possibilities these new contexts open up.
Take, for example, the demographic trends that have elicited panic
on the right over the “great replacement” and its threat to “Western civi-
lization” and the status of white Christians. It is worth recalling that this
fear is based on desperation, for the increasingly multicultural and secu-
lar character of modern societies is a real phenomenon; and continued
300 C onclu sion

progress in this direction will make people who share these sentiments
even more of a minority. In their place will come cohorts without such
worries and antipathies. Other trends will push in the same direction:
the steady expansion of higher education and the proliferation of post-
industrial jobs will undoubtedly continue. The political effects of such
change will not be automatic, but it is reasonable to imagine that they
can be turned against the forces of illiberalism and allow for a successful
pushback against right-wing panic and against those who base their ap-
peals on issues derived from culture war cleavages.
Likewise, the economic changes associated with neoliberalism and
globalization, so corrosive of the ties that held together the center-left,
need not have similar effects forever. Already there is a turn toward
greater use of government to mitigate unrestrained competition and a
determination to control globalization and repair its destructive effects.
The COVID pandemic, which exposed the danger of reliance by the
United States and other advanced economies on foreign sources for crit-
ical items and the potential bottlenecks in global supply chains, will re-
inforce this shift and encourage at least some “reshoring.” Political
creativity will be required to devise liberal and progressive responses to
these questions, but the history of resistance to Trump suggests that
there will be no shortage of innovative responses.
It may also make sense, if one wants to grasp the potential in the
current era of political menace, to return in part to the mentality that the
advocates of liberal order and democracy were forced to adopt and
maintain during the Cold War. The Cold War was a global struggle of
terrifying breadth and depth. Liberal order nevertheless existed within it
and was worth pursuing and sustaining in the relatively protected realm
of the non-Communist world. This limitation did not mean, however,
that the international order was marked only by chaos, competition, and
conflict. Even with illiberal regimes in place over vast territories and rul-
ing over huge populations, bargaining, compromise, and occasional co-
operation were possible and, within limits, effective. With the world
much more connected today and intercourse between states, cultures,
and economies much more intense, the potential for bargaining, com-
promise, and cooperation should be more extensive despite sustained
rivalry and competition.
 C onclu sion 301

The great difference between the Cold War era and the present is that
the relative power of the most powerful states has altered: the United States
is no longer so dominant and its economic weight no longer so over-
whelming; economic and political clout is now more dispersed, and likely
to remain so. This fundamental difference means that the quest for a stable
international order needs to operate with a more limited set of goals and
ambitions. It means, too, that efforts to promote democracy should be un-
dertaken with greater realism and less grand expectations, and with more
specific goals. And finally, the lesson of the most recent past is that some of
the most serious threats to liberal order and democracy come from within
democratic states themselves. The causes of this erosion of support for the
project need desperately to be addressed. This may seem a modest agenda,
but it is not, and it is no less urgent than any that has come before.
Would a more limited vision and program fail to inspire? It might
seem so, but it is useful to recall that the postwar order was not primarily
a product of utopian hopes and soaring rhetoric. It emerged from revul-
sion at what the depression, fascism, and war had wrought and from a
widely shared understanding of what needed to be done to prevent a re-
currence. It was a positive program inspired by a negative and often fear-
ful vision, and it served to guide the construction of a new world. Its
successes then led to a more expanded sense of the possible. Ambition
grew with the increased capacity to turn aspirations into reality. The po-
tential for incremental success can beget boldness, while high and unre-
alistic hopes are routinely disappointed. The focus, then, should be on the
illiberal enemy and the likely dire effects of its policies, on practical steps
aimed at its defeat, and on nurturing the prospects that exist and that will
continue to emerge for the advance of a liberal democratic world.