Introduction: Nostalgia in an End Time

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

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

‘Orders’ are hierarchies created by the strong, to keep the peace on their terms. There have been many orders: Roman, Byzantine, Imperial Chinese, Ottoman, Mughal, Spanish, French and British. They are often also imperial in their working. After all, most of history is a history of empire, a form of power that exercises final control over its subject societies. The great powers that do the ‘ordering’ remake the world partly through institutions and norms, and partly through the smack of coercion. Orders encourage a politeness of sorts, but a politeness that ultimately rests on the threat of force. When lesser powers forget this, the dominant states quickly remind them, as in 1956 when President Dwight Eisenhower threatened Britain with an economic crisis if it didn’t cease its military adventure over Suez. Supposedly, according to their creators, orders remake the world in ways that replace chaos with regularity, making international life more legible, peaceable and secure.1 As they order the world around them, hegemons articulate that order in elevated rhetorical terms that soften the realities of power. Euphemisms reflect the dominant power’s conceit that it is unique, serving only as the source of order, never disorder, and always for the common good. More predatory overlords, like Imperial Japan, gave their programmes of enslavement preposterous names, like the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’. The instinct to euphemize also infects the United States, the gentlest hegemon thus far: wars are ‘police action’, crushing revolts is ‘counterinsurgency’, propaganda is ‘information operations’ and torture is ‘enhanced interrogation’. Reflecting on order (imperium) in his own time, and the gap between form and substance, the Roman historian Tacitus put a speech in the mouth of a Caledonian king who said of Roman violence, ‘these things they misname order: they make a desolation and they call it peace’.2

To most of its admirers, America’s order, created around the end of the Second World War and now fading, was different because it was ‘liberal’, meaning that it was organized around freedom, consent and equality. To them, the ordering power was not an empire. It was a more benign ‘hegemon’, a word drawn from ancient Greek to mean ‘leader’. For the first time, according to this orthodoxy, the most powerful nation on earth forsook imperial aggrandizement, instead using enlightened measures to make a world safe for market democracy in which people could find emancipation. America possessed vast and unprecedented power, the hard instruments of wealth, intelligence, military force and an array of alliances. Despite being a new goliath, though, Washington bound itself into an international system of its own design, constraining its might and thereby winning authority. Unlike earlier orders, this was a truly international world system. It was founded primarily on rules. It opened up a once-closed world. It provided public goods like freedom of the seas, and stable monetary systems. Like all past hegemons, America regarded its settlement as not only legitimate, but sacred.3

An international class of security experts and policy practitioners believes that there was such a benign dispensation, and that it lasted seven decades. In common, they believe America and the world are best served through an enduring marriage of liberal principles and American primacy, or supremacy. To its admirers, this new design was imperfect but noble. It marked a system of peaceful ordering – of hegemony without empire – to which we might return. The only alternative, they fear, is regressive chaos.

The apparent fall of this system is all the more distressing to its defenders, given that the ruin seems to come primarily from within. Rather than being conquered by an external aggressor, America’s order self-destructs. Western citizens lose faith in the project and fall prey to false consciousness. Demagogues, aided by sinister foreign powers, whip them up into a backlash. As Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, warned: ‘The rules-based international order is being challenged … not by the usual suspects, but by its main architect and guarantor, the US.’4 Or, in the words of the idea’s principal theorist, G. John Ikenberry, it is as though the citizens of an unsubjugated Rome are tearing down their own city. An unsettling analogy for a supposedly non-imperial superpower.

We can speak of an American-led order. But a liberal one? We should be wary. For every order, including America’s, has a shadow. It is one of hypocrisy and the threat of force well beyond the bounds of liberal norms, be that threat brazen or quiet, astute or naive. Hegemons will have their prerogatives, whether this means insisting that others open their markets while protecting their own, demanding that their sovereignty be respected while conducting raids into others’ backyards, or denouncing election meddling while practising it. Not for nothing did Hedley Bull define order as ‘imperialism with good manners’.5

In all the yearnings for a restored order, and in the closeness of liberal ambition and empire, lies the ghost of President Woodrow Wilson (1913–21). Wilson, it will be recalled, sought to translate victory in the First World War into a new international order. He envisioned a world governed by laws and converging towards democracy, a ‘community of power’. But he, too, typified the tendency of hegemons to set rules for others and play by their own, the better to remain in the ascendancy. The new hegemon would supplant the old and exercise its prerogatives. ‘Let us build a bigger navy than hers’, he said of Britain in 1916, ‘and do what we please.’6 Like most great powers that boast of their mandate to bring peace to the world, Wilson made war often. Against weaker adversaries from Latin America and the Caribbean to post-Tsarist Russia, his commitment to enlarging liberty was imperial, even when he wasn’t aware of it. When he drafted a speech claiming ‘it shall not lie with the American people to dictate to another what their government shall be’, his secretary of state added in the margin: ‘Haiti, S Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama.’7 In this respect, America as a great power is unexceptional.

To be clear, the target here is not the minimal ‘baseline’ claim that an American-led order was better than the alternatives. It clearly was. It was better for the world that America became the dominant power, rather than its totalitarian competitors, even if the exercise of that dominance varied in its wisdom. As hegemonies go, America’s was the least bad by a decisive margin. It was a bulwark against twentieth-century totalitarianism; it won more than half the Nobel Laureate prizes, pioneered Jazz, helped rebuild Europe, invented the polio vaccine and took humanity to the moon. American hegemony was obviously less atrocious, and more constructive, than European colonial, Axis or communist empires. Some forget that America created this world through agonizing compromise. Its relative moral superiority, without power politics, cannot explain America’s rise. It cannot prevent its fall. And the belief in one’s indispensability can lead to the fall. Athenian primacy in the ancient Hellenic world was more open...