REQUIEM FOR AN OBSOLETE INTERNATIONAL ORDER?

You'd expect a past president of the Council on Foreign Relations to object, and Richard Haas does so for readers of The (Not Detroit) Free Press with an essay in ten observations.

1.  The war weakens the global norm against preventive war.
2.  The war highlights the costs of being an ally of an increasingly unilateral United States.
3.  The war is a boon for Vladimir Putin and Russia.
4.  It is an even bigger boon for China.
5.  Contrary to conventional wisdom that the war will dissuade nuclear proliferation, it may actually increase incentives for countries to acquire nuclear weapons.
6.  Because the war began while negotiations were taking place, it may complicate the future role of negotiations in advancing peace.
7.  The war weakens the norm against political assassination as a tool of national security.
8.  All wars involve human costs, and this one is no exception.
9.  All wars also entail economic costs.
10.  The war will strengthen isolationism in the United States.

The title of his essay is "A War the U.S. Didn’t Need,"  and some of those points are true of any war, whether or not it is approved of by an Act of Congress or a United Nations resolution.

That "international order," and those international norms and institutions, such as they are, serve as convenient props for members of the Professional-Managerial Class hanging onto whatever authority they have to boss Normals around.  Simultaneously, they have never been effective in taming the sort of tribal squabbles and regional wars that we have had with us, undiminished, since the end of the Cold War; nay, since the end of the War.

In Common Dreams, Alfred McCoy predictably laments its end.  "Trump’s radical 'America first' foreign policy seems primed to accelerate the decline of Washington’s international influence and degrade (if not destroy) the world order that the US has sustained since the end of World War II."  That's rich on a site lousy with proletarian internationalists who otherwise decry any exercise of Washington's influence that involves the military or money.  Funnily, Mr McCoy sort of gets it, coming to bury the old order, not to praise it.

At a broader level, President Trump’s foreign policy represents a forceful repudiation of the three key attributes of the “liberal international order” that has marked US global hegemony since the end of World War II in 1945: alliances like NATO that treated allies as peer powers, free trade without tariff barriers, and an ironclad assurance of inviolable sovereignty for all nations, large and small. In a matter of months, Trump has crippled NATO by expressing doubt about its critical mutual-defense clause, imposed an escalating roster of punitive tariffs antithetical to free trade, and threatened to expropriate several sovereign states and territories.

Not only is his ongoing demolition of Washington’s world order inflicting a good deal of pain on much of the globe—from Africans and Asians denied the US Agency for International Development’s lifesaving medicines (and potentially suffering 14 million deaths) to Eastern Europeans threatened by Russia’s relentless advance—but it also undercuts America’s future position on a post-Trumpian planet. His successor could, of course, try to reconcile with Canada and Mexico, placate an insulted Panamanian leadership, and even repair relations with NATO. But the president’s ongoing demolition of Washington’s world system is guaranteed to do lasting, long-term damage to the country’s international standing in ways that have so far eluded even informed observers.

To grasp the full extent of the harm Trump is inflicting on America’s place on this planet, it’s important to understand that Washington’s “liberal international order” is nothing more than the latest iteration of the “world order” that every global hegemon has created as part of its apparatus of power since the 15th century. To understand our own present and future, it’s necessary to explore the nature of those world orders—how they formed, how they functioned, and what their survival and destruction tell us about America’s declining imperial power.

A few paragraphs later, he notes that imperial powers, hegemons, if you will, decline and fall, and yet, norms and institutions persist.

For the past 500 years, every succeeding global hegemon—Spain, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States—has not only amassed wealth and military strength but also used that extraordinary power to propagate a world order that often transcended its narrow national interests. And once the inevitable imperial decline set in, a fading global hegemon often found that its world order could serve as a diplomatic safety net, extending its international influence for years, even decades beyond its moment of imperial glory.

While even the most powerful of history’s empires eventually fall, such world orders entwine themselves in the cultures, commerce, and values of countless societies. They influence the languages people speak, the laws that order their lives, and the ways that so many millions of us work, worship, and even play. World orders might be much less visible than the grandeur of great empires, but they have always proven both more pervasive and more persistent.

By structuring relations among nations and influencing the cultures of the peoples who live in them, world orders can outlast even the powerful empires that created them.

That sounds more like a bet on emergence than a call for another Conclave of Experts in Geneva or wherever.  And somewhere in the bundle of bookmarks is a Daniel Larison essay from American Conservative noting a related point.

There is a story that members of the foreign policy establishment tell us and themselves when they need to ward off criticisms of the current U.S. role in the world and suppress doubts about the wisdom of current U.S. strategy. The story is a triumphalist one that describes how a high-minded superpower benevolently shaped and “led” the world for seventy years, and how, despite a few minor deviations here and there, it brought peace and stability. It is a story of how the world needs U.S. “leadership” now and forever, and if the U.S. should “abdicate” the “throne” the world will fall into chaos.

This is the myth that defenders of the status quo have used to dismiss serious changes to the way that the U.S. acts in the world. It is not a true story. Most dangerous of all, it is a half-truth that credits the U.S. and the “liberal order” for every good thing that has happened since 1945 while discounting every past crime and blunder as having no bearing on what our foreign policy should be today.

What if the liberal international order lionized by our foreign policy establishment never really existed? More than that, what if it isn’t possible to have a liberal order at all?

Both Mr Larison and Mr McCoy argue that a collection of norms and institutions has to have an enforcer.  In a village, it's the constable, in an "international order," it's a hegemonic power.  And those turn over.  Herewith Mr Larison.

One problem with the “liberal order” myth is not just that it erases and sanitizes the record of U.S. foreign policy, but that it does so in order to facilitate more of the same costly errors in the future. If the story that U.S. policymakers and politicians tell themselves is that a meddlesome, hegemonic foreign policy is basically good and successful, and they deliberately conceal or ignore all of the evidence to the contrary, they will repeat the same kinds of terrible errors that they and their predecessors made in the past. Beyond that, they are liable to lead the U.S. into many avoidable conflicts out of a misguided sense of mission and obligation. This missionary drive is inherent in the nature of the “liberal order” project that “looks to extirpate rival alternatives.” That in turn tends to make U.S. foreign policy inflexible and uncompromising in the face of resistance, and it contributes to the stifling of criticism of that policy here at home.

And, which is amusing looking back to 2020 from now, Mr Larison concludes,

Rather than driving all adversaries to cooperate with each other against the U.S., Washington should look for ways to drive wedges between them. “To attempt to suppress every adversary simultaneously would drive the enemies to operate together, creating hostile coalitions.”  If we would avoid this, we will have to accept accommodations in some parts of the world. To do that, we will first have to give up on the flattering myth of the “liberal order.”

Take away China's oil supply and Russia's source of drones and maintain a balance of power among regional blocs might be precisely that dynamic at work.  And if we are due for a Fourth Turning shakeup of the Great Power Saeculum, or perhaps for the end of the Anglo-American Quincentennium, it might be as Richard "Belmont Club" Fernandez argues, that the existing "norms and institutions" have outlived their usefulness.

The America Firsters understand, perhaps cynically, the human urge of the twilight leaders to keep wearing sunglasses, and so, to gratify this longing, Trump created these bizarre sinecures such as the Gaza Board of Peace, and probably something similar for a Ukraine peace settlement. This performs the dual role of outflanking the UN — which honestly has disqualified itself by its inutility — and co-option, providing a pasture where the old internationalist bulls can graze.

That is the state of the geopolitical argument. Only history can tell whether Washington is right or committing a monumental mistake. But there is no question that it is the Trump administration, not the men in the sunglasses, who have made the big play. Time alone can determine the result, but Washington has made its move, Will it inaugurate disaster or a better world?

From Cuba to the Straits of Hormuz, from the bottom of the ocean to the mountains of the Moon, there is unfinished business that the existing "norms and institutions" have proven inadequate to finish.