Subjects: LCSH: Trump, Donald, 1946- | Hegemony--United States. | World politics. | Liberalism. | United States--Foreign relations--20th century. | United States--Foreign relations--21st century.
Classification: LCC JZ1480 .P664 2020 (print) | LCC JZ1480 (ebook) | DDC 327.73--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047003 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047004
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Many writers have dreamed up republics and kingdoms that bear no resemblance to experience.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Louise Knight at Polity for talking me into this, and to Inès Boxman who helped steer it through. Likewise, I am grateful to Chris Preble for talking me into the first version, which the Cato Institute kindly published and permitted us to draw on. And for permissions to reproduce material, thanks are due to Taylor & Francis, The Washington Quarterly, Daniel Immerwahr and Josh Shifrinson. I am grateful, for everything, to my wife Jane Rogers and to Hugh, our first-born, and to my family Brian, Muriel, Emily and Patrick, and to Frances Rogers for keeping the fires burning.
This book grew out of many conversations with friends, colleagues and worthy adversaries. My gratitude goes to David Blagden, Jeanne Morefield, Robert Saunders, Joshua Shifrinson, Tanisha Fazal, Michael Mazarr, Rosella Cappella Zielinski, Ryan Grauer, Apratim Sahay, Justin Logan, John Bew, Lawrence Freedman, Jennifer Lind, Robert Kagan, John Ikenberry, Daniel Deudney, Kori Schake, Jake Sullivan, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Barry Posen, Charles Glaser, Thomas Wright, David Adesnik, Hal Brands, Gil Barndollar, Peter Hitchens, Malcolm Chalmers, Daniel Deudney, Matt Fay, Michael Lind, Rebecca Lissner, Mira Rapp-Hooper, Asaf Siniver, Jamie Gaskarth, David Dunn, Mark Webber, Tim Haughton, Adam Quinn, Mike Sweeney, Stephen Wertheim, Daniel Nexon, Tarak Barkawi, Jerrod Laber, David Edelstein, Daniel Bessner, Chris Preble, John Glaser, Eric Gomez, Emma Ashford, Geraint Hughes, James Goldgeier, Jonathan Kirshner, Randy Schweller, Andreas Behnke, Mark Kramer and Dan Drezner.
Anyone writing about international order is in the debt of Hedley Bull and Robert Gilpin. I was never lucky enough to meet either, but hope they would have thought this book worthwhile. We are also intellectually indebted to two ‘Johns’ – Mearsheimer and Ikenberry – who, after the fall of the wall, built the theoretical floor on which the rest of us dance. The first John helped to hammer out the realist tradition that has inspired this work. And while I challenge the second John’s arguments, this book would not have been possible without his seminal body of thought.
Lastly, a word about the United States. Much of what follows is wintry. That wintriness does not flow from hostility. To the contrary, it is offered in a spirit of tough love, in solidarity with Americans and their allies who sense that something has gone very wrong. And in this century, flattery has gotten the republic nowhere.
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,