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As one would imagine, Packer’s essay caused a stir, if not a visceral loathing, among restrainers (the term du jour for anti-interventionists). But as historian Samuel Moyn tweeted, Packer’s essay — while gilding liberal internationalism for a rehabilitation of American primacy — reflected the reality that the old order cannot return after the war on terror, “that a militarism-first option of liberal warmongers can’t simply be revived.”¶ Moreover, military options that characterized the war on terror are currently off the table: preemptive invasion — and occupation — of sovereign nations, nation-building in the Middle East, unipolar dominance by the United States, etc. Due in part to the work of journalists like Azmat Khan, drone strikes have decreased dramatically during the presidency of Joe Biden. Elements of restraint are also evident in the Biden administration’s policy toward Ukraine. Ostensibly motivated by fear of nuclear escalation, Biden has rejected “New Cold War” hawks’ calls for a no-fly zone, sending certain high-tech weapons to Ukraine, and the prospect of a direct US intervention in Ukraine. In dealing with great or failed states, Biden is operating in the shadow of the US inability to remake the world, even as many national security figures wish this wasn’t so.¶ Alone or in their aggregate, these new realities do not comprise a foreign policy of restraint. Restraint must be instrumentalized for a new US foreign policy — it is not the end in and of itself. As the war in Ukraine continues with no foreseeable end in sight, it provides restrainers with the means to envision and implement a postwar vision for the world. Restrainers must be critical of efforts to expand US power in the short term (for instance, a blank check to the Pentagon to fight the war), but must also look to build an affirmative vision that relies upon international collaboration to reprioritize national security threats (around issues such as climate change, migration and refugee policy, poverty, and global health); deter imperial adventures by great powers; and demilitarize the landscape of foreign policy options once the war ends.¶ But first, what is restraint? Restrainers are often forced to defend their positions against liberal internationalists. The supposed clarity of liberal internationalism — support for global liberty and freedom achieved through military force and economic might, and buttressed by the inherent exceptionalism of the United States as a democratic superpower — is juxtaposed with the supposed murkiness of “restraint” as a category or term. Restraint can be defined in many ways, but as a heuristic, it is often reduced to the idea of pulling back from the world stage — and is pilloried as a synonym for “isolationism,” an even more loaded term.¶ In addition to the capaciousness of restraint, other factors hobble its proponents. Restraint has yet to be tested as a basis for US national security. Restraint is not codified in institutions of foreign-policy making in the United States — quite the contrary. Restrainers also disagree on the ends of restraint. Some restrainers are nationalists and fiscal hawks who believe that monies spent abroad fighting monsters, to paraphrase John Quincy Adams, impair US business interests and free trade, and raise debts and tax rates. These restrainers are less concerned with matters of international justice. Other restrainers are self-described realists focused on “offshore balancing,” who seek spheres of influence akin to the Congress of Vienna following the Napoleonic Wars.¶ Progressive or left-wing restrainers, like myself, believe in a demilitarized world determined by international cooperation on issues outside of military competition (poverty, health, climate, for example), that can limit conflagrations between great and small powers. Some progressive restrainers have faith in cooperation among member states of the United Nations through proposed forums like a “Summit of the Future,” which they believe can spearhead international comity.¶ These divides within the restraint camp are real, but have too often been hyperbolized, deployed to create caricatures or straw men in service of jingoism. Liberal internationalism struggles with its own contradictions — for example, relying on undemocratic means (military force) to create ostensibly more democratic ends (liberal democratic societies) — but these fissures have not hamstrung the salience of its policies.¶ This is because liberal internationalism became normative, even naturalized among foreign policy elites during World War II and into the Cold War. As historian Stephen Wertheim has written, US foreign-policy makers made a conscious choice to pursue primacy during World War II — and the Allied victory allowed them to sell their vision to the public. Except for brief moments, such as in the immediate postwar period and the late 1960s and early 1970s, restrainers in US foreign policy have occupied the minority position. The totalizing fear of Soviet dominance or Islamic terrorism conjured unfulfilled panics about the demise of freedom and democracy. Amid an unstable world and an era of permanent national emergency, the use of military force to prevent illiberalism and ensure American interests became an all too convenient, and easily available, option.¶ But restraint will not thrive simply as the critique or opposition to liberal hegemony. Restraint cannot be reactive and defensive, seeking out assorted hawks to lampoon online or in print. That is too easy. Restraint must also not be the corollary to military withdrawal following imperial misadventure — its resonance cannot lie waiting for America to make mistakes abroad, for empire’s excesses to be revealed. Such was the case with the withdrawal of United States from Vietnam in the 1970s, or Afghanistan in 2021.¶ As Emma Ashford has argued, restrainers must be forward-looking. They must build an alternative strategy to liberal internationalism that is codified around principles of universal equity; freedom from foreign interference, coercion, and invasion; global collaboration across wealthy and poor nations; and international institutions that provide checks and balances on military spending. In a time of multiple serious dangers — imperial war in Ukraine, autocrats flourishing in the Global North and Global South, the catastrophe of climate change, the unattended failures of the global response to COVID-19 — the temptation will be to adopt familiar paradigms that harken back to the Cold War.¶ This appears to be what is happening now, with the rush to subsume all global issues under the framework of “great-power competition.” Restrainers must acknowledge this reality while mitigating its outcomes. They can highlight the multiple paths to achieve global cooperation, to prevent future Ukraine-like invasions, and to avoid turning Ukraine into a “Munich” — an analogy and justification for preemptive invasions of nefarious regimes under a new US administration.¶ If these suggestions seem utopian, I offer history as perspective. “One-world” cooperative, internationalist visions were commonplace in the early aftermath of World War II. Ideas for sharing atomic secrets with the Soviet Union under the 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal report, or for a world federalist movement that reformed the United Nations to make the great powers more accountable to colonized nations, were discussed but never realized. Total war and atomic weapons broke open the realm of the possible in conducting world affairs. Given the transformative effects of the war in Ukraine on global issues (on trade, oil, transatlantic relations), the conflict could create a similar moment in which new paths become possible.¶ It is true that the political climate in the United States has stifled a discussion about the future, of what is acceptable discourse on war. The shock of the invasion, and the durability of Ukrainian resistance to the Russian military, propelled public support for the war. An honest conversation about a long-term commitment to Ukraine got lost in the process. The hand-wringing and fallout from the Congressional Progressive Caucus letter to President Biden, which called for a relatively anodyne series of policies that largely echoed the administration’s line on Ukraine, further testified to the caliber of debate about the war’s future. These factors have no doubt stymied restrainers’ agenda.¶ But restrainers are a more visible, organized bloc than at any time in recent memory. Restrainers have homes in academia and at various think tanks, not just the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, but also the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Stimson Center. The fallout from the war on terror is still fresh in Americans’ minds, and when polled, Americans overall favor foreign policy retrenchment. Combined with the steps not taken by Biden to escalate the war, this atmosphere proves to be favorable to restraint.

By the mid-1990s, the United States found itself in a position of primacy unmatched in modern history. Its combination of economic, military, and soft power dwarfed all others, and scholars such as William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks offered sophisticated and well-reasoned arguments for why the unipolar era might last as long or longer than the bipolar era that preceded it. What these optimists did not anticipate, alas, was the series of self-inflicted wounds that the United States would suffer in the years that followed, a train wreck of recurring blunders that has accelerated and worsened under Donald Trump. In particular, Trump’s egregious mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic is producing debilitating long-term effects that will further accelerate America’s decline. Even if he is defeated in November and a Joe Biden administration does nearly everything right, the consequences of Trump’s reign of error will be with us for many years to come.

Before Trump, the mistakes of the unipolar era fell under three main headings. The first error was adopting a grand strategy of liberal hegemony, which sought to spread democracy, markets, and other liberal values far and wide and to bring the whole world into a liberal order that was designed and led by the United States. This vastly ambitious strategy provoked a strong backlash from a variety of quarters, led to unnecessary and costly wars that squandered trillions of dollars, and undermined key sectors of the U.S. economy.

In the year and a half since U.S. President Joe Biden came to office, the international order has often seemed defined by a resurgence of great-power conflict. China and the United States remain locked in a robust rivalry. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Washington and its NATO allies have been drawn into a large-scale war in Europe that pits the liberal West against an autocratic Russia. In this volatile world, many analysts suggest, the most important kinds of power are once again military and economic: the continued ability of the United States to limit the threat of authoritarian rivals depends on the extent to which it can maintain the most advanced armed forces in the world and ensure that its economic might can outpace China’s.

Often overlooked in the commentary, however, are the ways in which military and economic power are dependent on social stability at home. Biden’s populist predecessor, Donald Trump, exploited growing divisions over class, race, gender, and religion for political purposes. He also shunned multilateral alliances, pulled out of international agreements, and cultivated cozy relations with autocrats such as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Russian President Vladimir Putin, all in the name of rejecting the values of liberal elites and the existing Western establishment in favor of a more nationalist, “America first” vision. One result is that many U.S. allies today have much less confidence in the ability of Washington to uphold the liberal international order. Although they have welcomed renewed U.S. engagement in NATO and Europe, many European governments wonder how long the approach will last if another populist president is elected in 2024.

The horrifying images of desperate Afghans trying to get out of Kabul after the Western-backed government collapsed in August seemed to signify a major juncture in world history, as America turned away from the world. Yet in truth, the end of the American era had come much earlier. The long-term sources of American weakness and decline are more domestic than international. The country will remain a great power for many years, but just how influential it will be depends on its ability to fix its internal problems, rather than its foreign policy.

The peak period of American hegemony lasted less than 20 years, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the financial crisis of 2007-09. The country was dominant in many domains of power—military, economic, political and cultural. The height of American hubris was the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when it hoped to remake not just Iraq and Afghanistan (invaded two years before), but the whole Middle East. America overestimated the effectiveness of military power to bring about deep political change, even as it underestimated the impact of its free-market economic model on global finance. The decade ended with its troops bogged down in two counterinsurgency wars, and a financial crisis that accentuated the inequalities American-led globalisation had brought about.

But, even if Biden were in a stronger position in relation to his reelection possibilities, his so-called “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class” and his “Build Back Better” program, contain streaks of nativism and protectionism that worry many abroad. Managing international affairs as an extension to domestic politics and domestic economic policy, as these policies propose, echoes some of Trump’s misunderstandings on how modern economy works. Biden’s administration, as a result, has retained many of his predecessor trade initiatives, including the aluminium and steel tariffs on American allies. Meanwhile, the current White House has shown little interest in strengthening the World Trade Organization or in joining the TPP successor, the CPTPP. To win Rust Belt voters for his party, Biden seems unwilling to depart from Trump’s legacy in this area. On top of that, Biden’s decisions to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan without consulting its allies, or of imposing against their wishes a tight deadline for leaving Kabul, was seen as reminiscent of the unilateralism of Bush and Trump. Not surprisingly, this brought fresh doubts in relation to the trustworthiness of the United States and renewed calls for a European strategic autonomy. The European Union foreign policy chief, Josep Borell, talked about a wake-up call for Europe, and about their need to think and act in their own strategic terms. On a similar note, the Biden administration’s nuclear submarine deal with Australia, secretly bypassing a diesel submarine deal between France and Australia, was resented by the former and by other of its European partners as a new manifestation of America’s unilateralism. It would seem that although Biden has formally called for a liberal internationalist crusade against authoritarianism, and asserted his commitment to a “rules based international order”, many of his actions have created doubts about his true convictions in this matter. This has led Richard Hass to assert that the United States wants the benefit of international order without the hard work needed for building and maintaining it. In sum, the possibility of the United States getting a “third chance” looks, indeed, ever more distant and uphill (Dorsey, 2021; Hass, 2021; Karni, 2021; McGee, 2021; Menon, 2021; Schake, 2021). The United States faces now an extremely difficult assignment in gathering an alliance base, even more difficult when directed against the golden goose that China represents. In 2020 the European Union’s trade with China reached US$709 billion versus US$671 with the United States, a gap in China’s favor that will increase with every passing year. Not surprisingly, the European Union members, with Germany at their head, have been reluctant to confront the Asian country, claiming a strategic autonomy in its relationship with it. Although timidly supporting Biden’s proposition in the June 2021 G7 Summit—to keep a firmer stand in relation to China- European countries were squeamish about getting dragged by the United States in this contest. Germany, Italy, and France made it clear that the G7 should not be hostile to China (Brands, 2021; Collison, 2021; Deutsche Welle, 2021; Mahbubani, 2020a). Even in Obama’s time, it was difficult enough to gather the support of allies against the economic opportunities that China embodied, as evinced for instance in the foundation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, AIIB. Proposed by China in 2013, Washington opposed the initiative and tried to boycott the participation of its main European and Asian allies. The fact that China could attain financial might in the world’s fastest growing region was considered a threat to the United States. However, the boycott’s fortune fell when one of America’s closest allies did not buckle under its pressure: The United Kingdom. As soon as London decided to participate as a founding member of AIIB, the rest followed suit before its initial subscription period was foreclosed. Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea, among others, were all in. The United States’ opposition to this initiative proved insufficient against the opportunities that it represented. In this context, China has moved in the opposite direction to the United States. Not only has it forged a strong strategic partnership with Russia, Iran, and Pakistan, but it has engaged in a multilateral institutional building process reminiscent of that undertaken by the United States between 1944 and the beginning of the 1960s, with the intention of creating a favorable international architecture. From the trio, Russia, Iran, and Pakistan, the first of them plays a fundamental role.

Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin via video link on December 30, which drew alarm from certain Western media outlets. The New York Times, for example, concluded that the call came amid a "weak moment" for both leaders. Readers were led to believe that both China and Russia find themselves "isolated and desperate." However, the assertion conceals a more difficult truth. That is, the U.S.-led unipolar order has experienced a number of challenges to its stability over the course of 2022 that show no sign of letting up in the new year. The signs of decay are both external and internal. Geopolitically, the United States finds itself playing a profitable yet unsustainable role in the Ukraine crisis. The United States has provided tens of billions worth of arms and assistance to Ukraine in contravention of the UN Charter since the conflict began in February 2022. U.S. leadership in the Joe Biden administration continues to reject diplomacy or peace talks in large part because weapons contractors have massively profited from the conflict. The U.S.'s pursuit of strengthening NATO's role in Ukraine has played an essential part in leading Russian leadership to conclude that it is in open conflict with the West. The U.S. has also leveraged the Ukraine crisis at the expense of Europe. Russia was once Europe's largest source of natural gas. U.S. pressure has led both the European Union and Washington to place enormous sanction on Russia. Sanctions have driven the EU into an economic crisis that, on top of inflation, threatens to cause large scale deindustrialization. While the U.S. dollar has benefited from Europe's economic crisis, some U.S. economists predict that spillover from Europe's crisis will lead to a recession in the United States at some point in 2023. The Ukraine crisis has been one critical flashpoint that reveals the instability of the U.S.'s unipolar imperial order around the world. While U.S. political leadership hypes China's so-called "isolation," the truth is that the U.S. and its allies are more divided and isolated than ever. U.S. investments on the African continent, for example, remain smaller than China's. The majority of African countries rejected U.S. and EU sanctions on Russia as a clear statement against using economic warfare to resolve conflict. U.S. attempts to create "alliances" in Asia have run into similar difficulties as nations such as South Korea and Japan have been unwilling to economically "decouple" from China. U.S. hegemony is also waning in the Middle East and Latin America. In 2022, Saudi Arabia expressed interest in joining BRICS and hosted the China-Arab Summit. These moves indicate that even the closest partners of the U.S. in the Arab world are looking to pursue stronger and more diverse relations with China. The election of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil and President Gustavo Petro in Colombia indicate that political headwinds are occurring in Latin America. Across the Global South, nations are recognizing that U.S.-led unilateralism and unipolarity has little to offer but instability and underdevelopment. It cannot be forgotten that 2022 also exposed the many internal contradictions of the U.S.'s social order. Unending inflation has decimated wages for the majority of workers. Natural disasters and winter weather have caused many casualties and left thousands homeless and hungry. Life expectancy in the U.S. has fallen to just over 76, nearly two full years below China. A majority of people in the U.S. already distrusted their political leaders and the Biden administration's handling of both the COVID-19 pandemic and the economy has given them no reason to reconsider. So-called media pundits and U.S. political leaders have relentlessly attacked China and Russia to deflect from the shortcomings of their own system and satisfy geopolitical aims. Yet the blame for much of the instability that exists in the world rests at the feet of the U.S.-led unipolar order. The pursuit of maximum global dominance, corporate profit, and military control has taken a massive toll on the U.S.'s legitimacy worldwide. Accumulated damages to the people and the planet worldwide have piled up and left the United States with a proven track record. Many nations are instead seeking a multipolar world capable of creating a global environment where people-centered development can occur peacefully. A growing number of the world's countries already recognize China as a leader in this effort, as the growth in the Belt and Road Initiative investments over the last year attest. U.S.-led unipolarity, on the other hand, enters 2023 in a state of instability and decay. The contradiction between multipolarity and unipolarity will no doubt remain significant in 2023. While it is not possible to predict the future, the existing condition of the U.S.-led unipolar order presents challenges to global peace and stability that will require stronger solidarity and integration among peace-loving forces to overcome.

American decline redux¶ Today the military, economic, institutional and ideational pillars that have supported the Pax Americana are being challenged by China. This raises two fundamental and intimately connected questions: if China surpasses, equals or even approximates the United States in these dimensions of power, can the Pax Americana endure? And, if it cannot, what will replace it? Posing these questions raises the contentious issue—contentious at least in the US—of whether American power is, in fact, declining. During his abortive 2012 run for the Republican presidential nomination, Jon Huntsman—President Obama's Ambassador to China, and now President Trump's Ambassador to Russia—succinctly expressed the prevailing view of the US foreign policy establishment when he said: ‘Decline is un-American.’ Leading US security studies experts agree. These primacists argue that the extent of China's rise—and hence of America's decline—are, like premature reports of Mark Twain's death, greatly exaggerated. Primacists believe the international system is still unipolar, and that US power will keep it that way for a long time to come.¶ This claim is increasingly dubious. Indeed, the case made by the ‘declinists’ of the 1980s—notably Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, David Calleo and Samuel P. Huntington—looks stronger every day.23 Contrary to the portrayal of their argument by many of their critics, the 1980s declinists did not claim either that America's post-Second World War power advantages had already dissipated, or that the United States was on the brink of a rapid, catastrophic decline. Rather, they pointed to domestic and international economic drivers that, over time, would cause American economic power to diminish relatively, thereby shifting the balance of power. In essence, the declinists believed that the United States was experiencing a slow—‘termite-like’—decline caused by fundamental structural weaknesses in the American economy that were gradually nibbling at its foundations.24 Kennedy himself was explicitly looking ahead to the effects this termite decline would have on the US world role in the early twenty-first century. As he wrote:¶ The task facing American statesmen over the next decades … is to recognize that broad trends are under way, and that there is a need to ‘manage’ affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States' position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage.25¶ The unwinding of the Pax Americana¶ Decline may be ‘un-American’, but that does not mean it isn't happening. America's ‘unipolar moment’ has turned out to be rather—well, momentary.26 The Great Recession that began in 2007–2008 did not end America's unipolar ascendancy. It did, however, focus attention on, and accelerate, the ebbing of American power—the evidence of which has cumulated rapidly over the ensuing ten years. This slippage of US dominance is chipping away at each of the four pillars on which the Pax Americana was erected: military power; economic power; institutions; and soft power. As these pillars erode, it becomes increasingly doubtful that the Pax Americana can endure.¶ China's challenge to American military power¶ Until now the dominant view within the US foreign policy establishment has been that military strength is the one area in which America's advantage is insurmountable (at least within any meaningful time-frame). American military power is considered by US policy-makers and many security studies scholars to be the geopolitical trump card—no pun intended—that will ensure continuing American dominance even if China closes the economic and technological gaps separating it from the United States.27 However, some within the foreign policy establishment are beginning to question this viewpoint. Important recent studies of the Sino-American military balance suggest that some analysts are taking a fresh look at the question of how long it will take China to catch up with the US militarily.¶ China and the United States face different grand strategic challenges. As self-styled global hegemon, America must be able project decisive military power to the three regions it considers vital to both its security and its prosperity: Europe, the Middle East and east Asia. In contrast, China's strategic goals, at least for now, are more limited. China aims at dominating its own geographic backyard: that is, it seeks regional hegemony in east and south-east Asia, which have become the focal points of Sino-American geopolitical competition. Even if China is not at present able to mount a global challenge to the US, there is evidence that it is beginning to draw level with the United States in regional military power in east Asia.¶ In a recent report on the Sino-American military balance, the RAND Corporation refers to the ‘receding frontier of US military dominance’ in east Asia.28 According to RAND, the trend lines in the Sino-American military rivalry in east Asia are not favourable for the United States: ‘Although China has not closed the gap with the United States, it has narrowed it—and it has done so quite rapidly. Even for many of the contributors to this report, who track military developments in Asia on an ongoing basis, the speed of change … was striking.’29 In a recent book, Roger Cliff, an east Asian security expert at RAND, says that by 2020 China's military establishment will be almost on an equal footing with America's with respect to doctrine, equipment, personnel and training (though still lagging behind in organizational structure, logistics and organizational culture). Consequently, he predicts that by 2020 American military dominance in east Asia will be significantly eroded.30 He predicts that the 2020s will witness a power transition in east Asia and that at this point China will be able to challenge the regional status quo.31¶ American economic decline and the impairment of US economic hegemony¶ During the past decade, signs of waning US economic power—and China's growing economic muscle—have become too numerous to ignore. Since the onset of the Great Recession, China has successively taken top position in the world in exports (passing Germany); in trade (passing the United States); and in manufacturing (claiming a title the United States had held for a century). In 2014 the World Bank made the stunning announcement that China had vaulted past the United States to become the world's largest economy (measured by purchasing power parity (PPP);32 and in the early to mid-2020s China is predicted to overtake the United States in GDP measured by market exchange rate.33 These shifts in the relative economic power of China and the United States have enormous economic and geopolitical implications. Indeed, in July 2017 Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, stated that in ten years' time the organization's headquarters—which are required by its by-laws to be located in its member country with the largest economy—could be in Beijing.34 Taken together, these indicators paint a clear picture of relative economic decline.¶ American primacists have advanced a number of clever but unconvincing arguments in an attempt to downplay the significance of the ongoing economic power shift from America to China. For example, some primacists assert that per capita GDP is a better yardstick of national power than aggregate GDP; that newly developed metrics of national power have diminished the importance of GDP as a measure of a state's economic power; that China is far behind the United States in advanced technology; and that China is incapable of doing innovation.35¶ This last claim is ubiquitous among primacists.36 It is, however, undermined by recent developments. For example, in September 2016 China began operating the world's largest radio telescope, which is intended to project China's ambitions deep into the universe, and bring back the kind of dramatic discoveries that win honours such as Nobel Prizes.37 In August 2016 China launched the world's first quantum satellite, which could lead ‘to new, completely different methods for transmitting information’.38 In another example of how China is catching up with the United States in innovation and technology, in June 2016 a Chinese computer (using made-in-China microprocessors) topped the ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers.39 In July 2017 China's State Council announced an ambitious plan to sprint to the front of the pack in artificial intelligence (AI), including both military and civilian applications.40 Indeed, The Economist recently observed that already ‘China could be a close second to America—and perhaps even ahead of it—in some areas of AI’.41 And China is moving to the forefront in green technologies (solar panels and wind-generated power) and in electric cars.42¶ The waning of US economic dominance may not be obvious to primacists, but it is perfectly apparent to many observers in the real world.43 The weakening of US relative economic power, which became unmistakably clear during the Great Recession, has undercut the Pax Americana both by compromising the United States' ability to manage the international economy and by shifting the Sino-American geopolitical balance in east Asia.

North Korea is broke and has been so for a very long time. Its conventional military preparedness is qualitatively degraded. It confronts a hostile and far more powerful alliance whose combined military strength dwarfs Pyongyang’s. Even as it is facing an adversary that has continuously and explicitly identified it as a potential target for a nuclear strike, its own nuclear umbrella has been yanked away and Pyongyang stands alone. North Korea, in short, has neither the economic capacity to engage in internal balancing through conventional arms buildup nor the diplomatic means to engage in external balancing through alliance formation.38 Consequently, it should be hardly surprising, or at least not so irrational, that Pyongyang would see nuclear weapons, the great equalizer and the only weapons system that can truly level the playing field for the humble and the haughty alike, as the singular source of salvation. Any other state facing a similarly dire strategic situation would likely have found nuclear weapons equally irresistible. Indeed, it is highly doubtful that South Korea, in a counterfactual scenario where the Cold War is presumed to have been won by the Soviet Union and it is the ROK that is facing an existential crisis, would have behaved any better than its northern brother. States have sought nuclear weapons for far lesser reasons—for something as vain as international prestige and nationalist pride. By comparison, survival is all the more compelling a reason for going nuclear.39 Not only are nuclear weapons the most reassuring means to ensure North Korea’s survival, they are also the cheapest, which makes them even more appealing for a country as broke as the DPRK. The cost-effectiveness of nuclear weapons is widely known. Because the bang produced by nuclear weapons is so big, both literally for its destructiveness and figuratively for its wider strategic impact, the economic cost of nuclearization can be easily justified in terms of return on investment. Relative to the spending requirements of upgrading its decaying conventional forces, the financial cost of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and the related missile program has in fact been very low. According to one estimate, North Korea’s core spending on nuclear weapons and missile programs in 2010 and 2011 was around US$0.5 billion each.40 While half a billion dollars is a large sum of money for a desperately poor country, as a proportion of North Korea’s total military expenditures, it is not such a huge sum, falling well within a single digit range of around 6 to 8 percent in the most recent years. Another estimate, coming from sources within the ROK government, puts the total cumulative cost of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and missile programs, including its long-range ballistic missile test in March of 2012, at around US$3.1 billion (see Table 3 for details). The expenditure on the strictly nuclear side has been surprisingly small, costing Pyongyang only US$1 billion for initial development and production, and less than half a billion dollars for the first two nuclear tests.41 About US$0.8 billion was spent on the two Taepodong missile launches conducted in 2006 and 2009, and the Unha-2 launched in April 2012 is estimated to have cost Pyongyang another US$0.8 billion. The expenditure will surely go up as North Korea attempts to miniaturize its nuclear warheads and fine-tune its ballistic missiles, but overall, the financial burden borne by North Korea in its nuclear pursuit has not been excessively punishing. On the other hand, the bang produced by it is undoubtedly much bigger than anything North Korea could have accomplished by spending the equivalent sum on conventional weaponry. A US$3.1 billion investment in nuclear weapons and delivery systems has enabled the DPRK to come very close to bridging a cumulative defence spending gap of nearly US$200 billion since 1992, restoring parity to the overall military balance in the Korean peninsula, and potentially acquiring deterrence capabilities against the US. By comparison, South Korea spent almost US$3 billion, about the same amount North Korea has spent on its nuclear and missile development, on just three Aegis-equipped destroyers. While these KD-III destroyers are no doubt significant enhancements to the force level of the ROK navy, their strategic impact pales in comparison to that of North Korea’s nuclear weapons. The ultimate vindication for the DPRK’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is the very fact that the Kim regime has defied all odds and repeated predictions of an inevitable collapse to hang on to its half of the Korean peninsula on an arguably much stronger strategic footing. Of course, the debacle that is the North Korean economy continues, as does the untold suffering of North Koreans. However, in terms of its external security situation, it cannot be denied that North Korea’s strategy of pursuing internal balancing asymmetrically—that is, by going nuclear—has produced tangible and substantial results. The numerous concessions and assistance that Pyongyang managed to extract from the international community, while significant, are secondary benefits. The most obvious and important outcome is the irrefutable reality that instead of being destroyed by the US as was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or sharing East Germany’s fate of being absorbed out of existence, the DPRK continues to exist as an independent state. As Kim Jong Un recently declared in his first public speech, “Superiority in military technology is no longer monopolized by imperialists, and the era of enemies using atomic bombs to threaten and blackmail us is forever over.”42 This declaration, while exaggerated, as one would expect from the DPRK, is not mere grandstanding and bravado; there is a significant kernel of truth in Kim’s claim, in that nuclearization has in fact enhanced North Korea’s security. This is not to suggest that the DPRK is now secure. On the contrary, the incomplete weaponization of its nuclear devices and its lack of a credible long-range delivery system mean that North Korea’s deep-seated insecurity is yet to be put permanently to rest. Nonetheless, Pyongyang’s nuclear quest has achieved the singular objective sought by North Korea, its survival, at a bargain price equivalent to just three destroyers. It is in this Herculean achievement, the fact that the world is still grappling with the headache that is the DPRK two decades after the demise of the Cold War, that we can locate the method in the madness of Chairman Kim and the instrumental rationality of Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

This report investigates the long-term implications of Chinese regional hegemony. In a world in which the two powers are peer competitors, the future is uncertain, and leaders are free to make decisions across a wide range of possibilities likely to fundamentally change facts on the ground. When, in a certain region, one nation has an overwhelming preponderance of power, we can be more confident it will dominate that area as long as it desires to do so. While we cannot predict much about what China will use its power for, at the very least we should expect it to seek to gain more influence in its region at the expense of the U.S. and become more likely to succeed in disputes between the two nations in which each side seeks out the cooperation of others. China will be able to assert economic and diplomatic dominance over its own region even if the U.S. maintains or increases its military presence in nations like Japan and South Korea.

Checking the rise of China through alliances is unlikely, as the countries of East Asia generally do not see it as a threat to the same extent the U.S. does; nor do they share concerns about the internal human rights situation of that country or other issues, like autonomy for Hong Kong, that American policymakers have prioritized. Moreover, contemporary military alliances in East Asia actually give the U.S. little in terms of diplomatic advantage, as disputes over Huawei and other issues reveal. Even if other countries become more willing to let the U.S. defend them militarily, American influence can still decline. Given these facts, and the greater ability of China to bring about economic and diplomatic pressure on the region due to geography, East Asian countries are more likely to accommodate it than the U.S. while avoiding decisively aligning with either power.

The international system and politics are transiting in nature, ordained with continuity and change, hence, can neither remain static nor stable for a longer duration. As posited by Kennedy, the imperial overstretch of the US will eventually cause its decline as it did happen to previous superpowers. The unipolarity of the US power structure, gained in the post-Cold War era, may not last long as it was designed to suit its hegemonic and national interests, hence, contested by other emerging powers. This rapid decline is the result of an overstretch caused by her hegemonic obligations and preponderant military and economic power to invariably get involved in the global issues with the desire to meld the events in its favor. Following the footsteps of her predecessors like the Roman Empire, British Empire, and the recently melted Soviet Empire, the trajectory of the downwards spiral is a reality, not a myth.

For longevity of its dominance in international relations, the US needs to revisit its military, economic and political relationship with the rising powers since the choices and options adopted by the contesting powers would remain beyond its purview. An approach based on cooperation and mutual co-existence through economic interdependency may be the sole option left with the superpower to reconcile with the political, economic, and military differences to survive with the acquired status.

The final thing the U.S. should do is stop signaling its hopes of fundamentally changing who holds power in Beijing and instead focus on its own affairs. In July 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a speech on China that some hawks interpreted as calling for a policy of regime change. Critics of Beijing regularly argue that the Chinese take too dogmatic an approach to issues of national sovereignty, all but admitting that mutual hostility between the powers is rooted in the desire of many in the U.S. to overthrow the government of Xi Jinping and end CCP rule, if not militarily than by encouraging internal discord. Of course, the U.S. has no ability to overthrow, at acceptable cost, the Chinese government or fundamentally change its political culture. Setting such goals makes cooperation in areas like disease prevention and climate change more difficult.

Throughout history, countries have exercised power abroad due to economic success, the factor on which great power influence rests. For the U.S. to compete with China, it should invest internally: infrastructure improvements, GDP growth, improved educational outcomes, and other measures to increase innovation and wealth creation. While such goals are difficult to achieve, it is easy to see that increasing spending on a military competition with China in its own backyard is not helpful.

The People's Republic of China has used force when measures short of war have proven inadequate to secure its borders or strategic interests (as in Korea, India, and Vietnam), but, by marked contrast with India in Goa or Indonesia in Timor-Leste, it gave diplomacy the decades needed to resolve the Hong Kong and Macau issues without bloodshed. Beijing has shown a similar preference for negotiations rather than the use of force to settle the Taiwan issue. Cross-strait tensions are lessening. It should be encouraging that China has insisted on United Nations authorization for its military activities abroad, which are directed at peacekeeping and against piracy. Still, China is modernizing its military at a peculiar moment of history. The United States inherited worldwide military superiority from the collapse of its Soviet rival. Without much discussion, it has embraced the neo-conservative agenda of sustaining this superiority at all costs. But rising Chinese defense capabilities erode American supremacy. China's new anti-carrier weapons endanger U.S. force projection capabilities in the Western Pacific; its anti-satellite programs imperil U.S. global surveillance and communication capabilities; its growing operations in cyberspace menace U.S. government operations and the economy of the American homeland alike. These are serious challenges not just to American hegemony but to core U.S. interests. They have begun to draw a response. The result is a deeply troubled Sino-American military relationship despite the diminishing prospects for war in the Taiwan Strait. China will persevere in its efforts to build a credible counter to American coercion. The United States will not soon abandon its obsession with the retention of absolute military superiority everywhere. A less hegemonic objective would allow the U.S. to accommodate a more powerful China while retaining the ability to prevail in any conflict with it. As things are, increasingly overt military confrontation between China and the United States is likely. These inherent tensions — along with those arising from the huge bilateral trade imbalance in favor of China — are why the idea of a US-China duopoly like the so-called G-2 is infeasible even if it were desirable, which it is not. Still, the world economy is about to see the displacement of the United States from its 20th Century preeminence. China will join the U.S., the EU, and Japan at the top. India, Brazil, Russia, and others in the G-20 will follow. What is in prospect is not the hegemony of one or two countries but its opposite — a multipolar balance of economic power. China, like Japan, is, of course, a country with a population vastly larger than it can prosperously support on its own resource base, large as that is. And China is late in the search for access to raw materials for its burgeoning industries. (So is India.) China has a vital interest in the perpetuation of a global economic order open to trade and investment. China is now enmeshed in multilateral organizations in which it must daily demonstrate its dedication to the sovereign equality of nations, great and small. All this enforces the respect for comity that is the essence of a "responsible stakeholder." It informed People's Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan's cautious suggestion last spring that it would be better to manage the dollar down to a sustainable international role than to have it collapse. But America is out of practice at dealing with independent power centers. For the past two decades the United States has been the undisputed global hegemon. For 40 years before that, it was the indispensable arbiter of the bloc of nations known as the "free world." American politicians are unaccustomed to formulating policy through multilateral consultations with other nations. Beijing isn't very good at this either, but seems more open to it than Washington. The United States will, as always, do what must be done, after it has exhausted all of the alternatives. But this will take time and cost the United States further prestige and influence. Meanwhile, China's global role will grow, especially if Beijing sustains the modesty and competence for which its diplomats have become known, rather than the arrogance that some of its domestic officials increasingly exemplify. The Chinese Communist Party has delivered prosperity to ordinary Chinese, which is why it enjoys their support. Eighty-six percent of Chinese think their country is on the right track. Chinese see proof of the superiority of their political-economy in the apparent effectiveness of its response to the financial crash and its aftermath. Their government's policies have so far succeeded in sustaining high rates of economic growth through programs that enhance long-term economic and intellectual competitiveness. The contrast with the muddled self-indulgence of Washington's response to the crisis, in particular, is striking. Americans have so far shrunk from the hard decisions necessary to restore fiscal integrity to their government or to reverse serious decay in their nation's human and physical infrastructure. The recession has joined foreign wars and continuing deterioration in relations with the Islamic world as a factor accelerating American decline. China seems certain to emerge from the crisis with a much larger and more competitive economy. The generation born under the single-child policy is coming of age. It is far more inclined to consumption than its frugal predecessors. A faster transition to growth driven by domestic consumption than many have thought possible seems in prospect. China's imports are now rising much more rapidly than its exports. Its balance of payments surplus, huge as it still is, fell by half in 2009. Continuing economic growth, deepened ties with Asian neighbors, the progressive internationalization of a yuan that is rising in value, all promise domestic stability and greater international stature for China in coming years. The current self-congratulatory mood in China is therefore entirely understandable. Yet it masks the underlying weakness of the Chinese political system. Government in contemporary China derives its legitimacy almost entirely from its ability to deliver continued rapid economic growth. It stands for no credible values, neither trusts nor is trusted by those it rules, suffers from a high level of corruption, and has no clear vision for self-improvement. If America's politics are widely viewed as so venal as to be dysfunctional, the Chinese system is seen as cynically manipulative and of questionable legitimacy. Without political reform, China will remain vulnerable to unrest should the economy falter. If there is no rule of law in China, Beijing's word will be doubted abroad. Despite its economic successes and growing defense capabilities, China's international influence will remain limited as long as it fails to evolve an attractive political system. It is not impossible that it may do so but there is no evidence at present to suggest that it will. A Chinese perception that the United States is attempting to leverage its military superiority to keep China down could goad Beijing into efforts to dislodge America from its position of global dominance. Given the continuing disparities in national power, the ensuing struggle would be a long one. The trigger would probably be some incident derived from U.S. military operations offshore China or from the Taiwan issue, to which Sino-American relations remain hostage. This is unlikely, but, unfortunately, it is not impossible to imagine. As I speak, for example, China is actively considering how to put effective pressure on the United States to halt arms sales to Taiwan. China wants Washington to live up to Ronald Reagan's commitment to restrain and reduce such sales in return for credible pursuit by Beijing of a peaceful settlement of its differences with Taipei. Sanctions on selected American companies — modeled on those the U.S. Congress has imposed on Chinese companies selling objectionable items to others — are apparently among the options before China's leaders. In the current economic climate, any such move by China could trigger a nasty confrontation and unleash an orgy of American protectionist retaliation that would likely set off a trade war. I do not consider such a development likely. If nothing else, however, the possible consequences of miscalculation by Beijing or Washington illustrate the global stake in continuing prudent management of the Sino-American relationship by both sides.

"Let the gull'd fool the toils of war pursue, where bleed the many to enrich the few," wrote the 18th-century English poet William Shenstone. That is what is exactly happening during the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Whether it's the people of war-torn Ukraine, sanction-ridden Russia, or insecurity-ingrained Europe, all have suffered greatly. The US, the culprit of the Ukraine crisis, has been constantly taking advantage of others' misfortune to maintain its hegemony. Every why has a wherefore. Edward Carr, a leading British scholar of international relations, reminded people more than 80 years ago that the US was a master in using kindness to disguise selfishness. Boasting abundant resources, strong industry and geographical advantage, Ukraine could have achieved development. While the country pursued a relatively balanced policy in the early years of its independence, the US supported and incited the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Square Revolution in 2014 to push for a pro-Western agenda, splitting Ukraine politically from within and geopolitically between Russia and Europe. It is really thought-provoking that the "Gateway to Europe" has become one of the poorest countries in Europe, the frontline of NATO's eastward expansion, and the fault line of "color revolutions" and conflicts. In 2014 when the crisis broke out in eastern Ukraine, while Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine held several rounds of consultations and signed two Minsk Agreements to cool down the situation, the US took an opposite direction to fan the flame by inciting the anti-Russian and pro-Western forces in Ukraine to escalate the conflicts on the ground. In the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, the US is reaping the benefits without getting itself involved militarily. It never intended to come to Ukraine's rescue, the idea used as a political tool by the US to trap Russia in a seemingly endless conflict. We might need to go a bit further back into history to conclude how the US hegemony had created all the security trouble for Europe, Russia and Ukraine. It is well known that the US became a global superpower after the two world wars which plunged Europe into chaos and destruction and led to its dependence on the US military hegemony and NATO. Looking for a pathway to common security, Europe and the US signed the Helsinki Accords with the Soviet Union in 1975, which saw the establishment of the Organization for Security and Cooperation as well as the indivisible, cooperative and comprehensive approach to security. However, after the Cold War, the US overturned the European security agenda and rejected Russia's bid to join NATO four times. The aim was to make Russia the imaginary foe to justify US hegemony. Since 1999, the US launched five major NATO expansions, pushing its borders eastward by more than 1,000 kilometers to include a large number of Eastern European countries, splitting Europe further. It also promised Ukraine, Georgia and other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) NATO membership, posing a realistic threat at the doorstep of Russia. Due to the hegemonic mentality and actions by the US, the vision of indivisible common security broke into pieces, and Russia, Ukraine and Europe were left in a security dilemma and constant conflicts. Former US congressman Tulsi Gabbard stated in a recent interview that President Joe Biden could have ended the crisis by promising not to admit Ukraine to NATO. But he didn't, because the US is seeking an excuse to impose sanctions on Russia, and it could profit from war for the American military-industrial complex. Ukraine has become another victim in a series of global security crises instigated by the US, just like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Now the hegemonic power is pushing for an Asian version of NATO expansion via its Indo-Pacific Strategy, aiming to contain China. Hegemony is the source of evil and chaos, while the common security is the only correct option to avoid and end crises. Whether it is Europe or Asia, the rationales of security are the same: Security cannot be enjoyed exclusively, but only shared; It is not a zero-sum game, but win-win cooperation. History may prove again that, the one who makes a fool of others will eventually make a fool of himself.

After its chief competitor, the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1989-1991, it extended this strategy globally. Proponents of liberal order draw on the logic of hegemonic stability theory.7According to that theory, one dominant state exercises such a preponderance of power that it lessens the insecurities that lead to arms races and spirals of alarm, enabling other states to ease their security competitions with neighbors and rivals, relax their arms programs, and focus on economic growth. More ambitiously, it not only reshapes institutions and markets but remakes the preferences of other states. To its admirers, this order, for all its imperfections, achieved unprecedented general peace and prosperity. It was based on a harmony of interests between the United States and the rest of the world. It made the world a single system or “whole,” as Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass claims.8 Revision of the order, and retreats by the hegemon, will lead to increased disorder. On the campaign trail Donald Trump explicitly threatened the status quo. He denounced allies as delinquent and threatened to shred alliances, tolerate nuclear proliferation, re-erect tariff walls, and abandon international agreements. To security traditionalists who oppose Trump, his revisionist challenge accelerates the collapse of a “liberal order” under a transnational assault by authoritarian forces. In a state of shock, they seek orientation in an ahistorical myth about the world before this dark age. As Princeton’s Aaron Friedberg tweeted, “After WWII US built a system of democratic states, tied together by trade, institutions and common values — a liberal order. Now it needs to defend that order against the illiberal powers it tried to incorporate after the Cold War.”9 Historian Jeremy Suri charges that Trump is plunging the world into a great regression by “launching a direct attack on the liberal international order that really made America great.” The elements of this order include “a system of multilateral trade and alliances that we built to serve our interests and attract others to our way of life.” Suri explains: Through the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, among other institutions, the United States led a postwar capitalist system that raised global standards of living, defeated Soviet communism, and converted China to a market economy. Through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe and a web of alliances in Asia and the Middle East, the United States contained aggressive states, nurtured stable allies, and promoted democratic reforms when possible.10 This sunny “highlights package” offers a strangely bloodless retelling of history. It is a euphemistic rendering of the Cold War and the actual practice of anti-Soviet containment by the superpower and its proxies. The Bay of Pigs, napalm, East Timor, the shah of Iran, and the Contras fade into the background. That this pristine retelling should come from distinguished historians of American diplomacy like Friedberg and Suri suggests how seductive the vision of an earlier and better order has become. Trump, too, is complicit in this mythmaking. Like his opponents, he frames his own election in stark terms. Trump speaks of a dark prehistory of “globalism,” of open borders, predatory capitalism, futile wars, and general American victimhood, and a return to wholesome nationalism, industrial regeneration, civilizational rebirth, and, of course, making America “great.”11 What was the liberal order, as its defenders define it? If an “order” is a coming together of power with social purpose, a “world order” is an international design of institutions, norms, and patterned relationships that defines the global balance of power.12 Some commentators argue that for a viable world order to emerge in a time of turbulence, the United States may have to compromise. Amitav Acharya, Michael Mazarr, and Henry Kissinger seek to revive the concept of world order, but unlike those of other “world order” visionaries, their proposed designs are pluralistic and require the United States to temper its universalism for the sake of stability and negotiated coexistence in a polycentric world.13 By contrast, the liberal order is a missionary project that looks to extirpate rival orders and demands the perpetuation of American dominance. As an ideal type, the “liberal order” entails a copious number of norms and institutions, suggesting that good things go together. In accounts of the postwar liberal order, many or all of the following features appear, though with varying emphasis: the rule of law and the supremacy of “rules,” humanist globalism and humanitarian development, free trade, multilateral cooperation, the security provision of the United States (principally through its permanent alliances), and a commitment to liberal progress through the advocacy of democratic and market reforms. Its institutions span the United Nations, NATO, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (followed by the World Trade Organization), the IMF, and the World Bank. A commitment to protocols and the bridging of divides figure centrally. Hence phrases like “open, rule-based international economy” abound.14 The “order,” proponents argue, embodied also a pattern of behavior, or, as Jake Sullivan at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace explains, a “system of norms, institutions, and partnerships” whereby, under the hegemon’s stewardship, collective cooperation trumped competition for relative advantage, significant shares of sovereignty were ceded for the benefits of collective action, and a global consensus spread.15 An “illiberal order” would presumably be the opposite of these things: politically and economically divided and closed, authoritarian, uncooperative, coercive, and disrespectful of rules and norms. The liberal order is necessarily hierarchical. To speak of liberal order is to speak also of American primacy, with the former depending on the exercise of the latter. Nostalgists do not deny that the American superpower upheld it partly through overwhelming military strength. However, they emphasize the nonbloody uses of force, for example, deterring and dissuading adversaries, reassuring and uniting allies, and preventing conflict. And they stress the consensual, attractive quality of American hegemony. Postwar continental Europe therefore stands out as a favorite area of emphasis, as an “empire by invitation.”16 Most anxious observers agree that a significant “fall” is occurring.17 To explain it, they weigh heavily an alleged loss of political will within the West. Leading theorists of liberal order, such as Princeton’s G. John Ikenberry, have long warned that “the hallmarks of liberal internationalism — openness and rule-based relations enshrined in institutions such as the United Nations and norms such as multilateralism — could give way to a more contested and fragmented system of blocs, spheres of influence, mercantilist networks, and regional rivalries.”18 Once optimistic that the order would withstand geopolitical challenges and prove resilient, Ikenberry now fears a different kind of insurgent threat, flowing not from hostile subversive states but from within. Working- and middle-class populations, he suggests, may lose faith in the order as democracy degenerates.19 Similar complaints have arisen across the Atlantic. Warnings against U.S. disengagement are a staple of rhetoric from security thinkers in allied countries.20 For Robin Niblett, director of the internationalist Chatham House, Trump replicates and feeds on the destructive forces that powered “Brexit,” forcing liberalism into retreat.21 For the University of Exeter’s Doug Stokes, as for Ikenberry and Niblett, domestic discontent may unravel the worldwide arrangements that best served America’s “globalized” interests. For the old order to reproduce itself, it must make a new settlement with the American working class.22 Most of these diagnoses have a common premise. All offer an upbeat, potted history of the world created in and after 1945. Many then blame the crumbling of that world on agents or forces that are separate from it.23 If the order is perishing, they argue, it is being assassinated rather than dying from its internal failures. They have little to say about the significant reverses that occurred while the order reigned. These included some of America’s most disastrous wars, geopolitical chaos in the Persian Gulf from the Iran-Iraq War to the present sectarian breakdown, resurgent jihadi Islamism, the greatest act of urban terrorism committed by a nonstate actor in history, the eurozone crisis, the economic regression of Russia under “shock therapy,” mounting and unsustainable debt, the global financial crisis, the entrenchment and immobility of wealth, and the growing underclass of working poor. Rather than attributing to the old order the failures that occurred on its watch, nostalgists blame mismanagement, or popular fatigue, or “populism” and demagogues that whipped up mass discontent. They give credit to the order and U.S. primacy for benign developments, discounting other possible contributors such as the deterrent effects of nuclear weapons or the memory of World War II. That the order may have been complicit in its own undoing is hardly considered. Nostalgia for a lost order is not just the complaint of self-styled liberal internationalists of any particular faction. It has a wider provenance among those who believe today’s choice lies between continuing American primacy and chaos. The strength of the consensus is reflected in a Brookings Institution paper, coauthored by former high-ranking officials in the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, urging the White House to revert to a traditional posture, upholding an order favoring openness, human rights, and peace, and claiming that this is the only viable grand strategy for the United States.24 The hawkish intellectual Robert Kagan argues that the order established after World War II was a “liberal enlightenment project” that is now “challenged by forces from within and without,” not only because of popular fatigue with the burdens of international leadership but because Americans have forgotten the reasons their country adopted the role as the world’s guarantor and stabilizer.25 Primacists such as Robert Lieber, Thomas Wright, and Eliot Cohen issue similar warnings.26 The prominence of neoconservatives among this chorus is ironic. Critics once accused neoconservatives of violating the principles of liberal order with their bellicose unilateralism, by agitating for preventive war in Iraq in March 2003 without an explicit UN mandate, and by justifying torture. But this reflects the paradoxical problem at the heart of liberal “world ordering.” On the one hand, under most popular visions of liberal order, the hegemon creates a world based on deference to institutions and rules. But actual international life includes hostile, noncooperative forces that refuse to defer. Thus the liberal order includes conflicting rather than complementary rules and principles. It contains “veto players” like Russia or China with different conceptions of order. The protection and enforcement of such an order, and the enforcer’s own preponderance, rests upon selection and the exercise of a hegemon’s privilege. Liberal world orders typically involve several impulses, namely, internationalism, integration, and imperialism.27 That last, imperialism, is the most contentious. Historically, world orders, with their trading protocols and monetary regimes, and control of sea lanes, commercial routes, and access to raw materials, are designed and imposed by the strong. The opening of Asian markets, a celebrated feature of liberal order, was also a pre-1945 byproduct of violent and imperial coercion, imposed on China by Great Britain through the Opium Wars and on Japan by American Commodore Matthew Perry with the threat of naval bombardment in 1853-1854. Proponents of liberal order occasionally admit that what is sometimes framed straightforwardly as a rule-bound order is in fact a system of imperial power (and vigilante privilege) exercised by a hegemon. Robert Cooper, the former diplomat and adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair, argued that if the world had a civilized core that deserved lawful conduct, there was also a barbarous periphery that warranted “rougher methods of an earlier era.”28 “Among themselves,” he wrote, “the postmodern states operate on the basis of laws and open co-operative security” but “in the jungle, one must use the laws of the jungle.”29 One-time advocate of American empire Michael Ignatieff admitted that being an imperial power “means enforcing such order as there is in the world and doing so in the American interest. It means laying down the rules America wants (on everything from markets to weapons of mass destruction) while exempting itself from other rules (the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and the International Criminal Court) that go against its interest.”30 At the height of the war on terror, jurists advising the George W. Bush administration used a similar logic to justify the suspension of the rule of law and Geneva conventions.31 One can defend these inconsistencies as necessary, or not. That they continually recur suggests that liberal “world ordering” is an inescapably compromised process. The United States is an imperial power, even if it is distinct from former empires. It may lack the land hunger of empires past and look different from European or Asian imperialisms. It was averse to formal annexation, refused to claim the mantle of empire, and made a succession of retreats, from Vietnam, Lebanon, and Iraq. But it still throws its weight around in imperial ways: through coercion, subversion, or patronage, it penetrates the sovereign autonomy of other states to constrain their choices. The political economy underlying American interventions was at times coercive, as in the structural-adjustment programs visited on developing countries from Eastern Europe to Latin America. Leading primacists who speak up for liberal world ordering have earlier acknowledged that the American project overseas must be necessarily imperial, albeit in this case of a distinctively informal “American” kind, involving the forceful suppression of revolt, hard-nosed enforcement of parameters around other states’ policies, and the exercise of unequal bargaining influence.32 But for the most part, today’s lamentations for a dying liberal order do not acknowledge the necessarily imperial component. This is the imperialism that does not know itself. Invocations of the liberal world order have become the ritualized language of the foreign policy establishment. In the academy, there is a well-established scholarly study of “world orders.”33 But too often, especially among think-tank specialists and the foreign policy commentariat, the liberal order’s admirers assert what they ought to prove. In that respect, President Trump’s former deputy assistant for strategic communications at the National Security Council, Michael Anton, was right to argue that the foreign policy establishment has become a “priesthood,” fonder of recapitulation than argumentation.34 It repeats its axioms but neglects to ground its vision in a careful reading of history or the present. A good example is an article by Edward Luce in June 2017, mourning the internal defeat of Western liberalism and a new world “disorder.” To demonstrate the imminence of disorder under Trump, Luce did not examine what Trump was actually doing beyond the decision to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement, which is not an unprecedented pullback. The many Trump administration moves that have affronted Moscow go unmentioned: for example, the reinforcement of NATO through increased funding of the European Reassurance Initiative; and the bombing of the Assad regime, Putin’s ally, in April 2017. Instead, Luce cited the statements of two allies who were wondering where Trump’s behavior would lead, gossip about personality clashes in Trump’s court, and corroborating statements from other figures in the foreign policy establishment who take the “liberal order” as an article of faith, betraying a confirmation bias. Without evidence, he then accused President Obama of “global retrenchment.”35 Typical of the genre, Luce contrasted these recent failures with the postwar internationalism and institution building of President Harry Truman. To be reprimanded for violating established norms of American “global leadership,” against the exalted standards of Truman, is an occupational burden that comes with the presidency. Before Trump, critics had accused presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama of retreating from a long-standing commitment to a liberal world order. The charge that Washington is abandoning a noble Trumanite diplomatic past is less an observation than a political predisposition, substantively shallow yet part of the framework within which debate is conducted. International history after 1945 is more fraught. Accusations that U.S. presidents are flouting a long-standing postwar liberal order rely upon a mythologized account of history. When presidents wage war unilaterally, topple governments, coerce allies, threaten abandonment, disregard the demands of international institutions, practice economic protectionism, or cultivate illiberal allies and clients, they may or may not be practicing prudent statecraft. Either way, their behavior is unexceptional. They are not departing from tradition. Let us revisit history first in the area of trade and political economy. President Trump disturbs defenders of the liberal order partly through his economic nationalism, his promise to rebuild American manufacturing industries by erecting protective tariff walls, and his withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The extent to which U.S. membership in the TPP represented a long-standing commitment to liberal order is doubtful, given that the United States signed the agreement in February 2016 and withdrew in January 2017, and given that the agreement’s intent was to exclude and contain China as much as to integrate other Asian economies. Nonetheless, nostalgists assert that Washington’s commitment to free trade was a central pillar of liberal order. Identifying the marketing precepts of the Washington consensus with liberal order, they present Washington’s various “Open Door” policies as both a cause and symptom of the world’s liberalization. Without question, the United States in the postwar period dismantled the economic architecture of the British Empire. It strove to reshape the international economic environment on its terms, to establish and exploit the dollar as the reserve currency, to promote open markets, and to make a world safe for the penetration of American capital. How far did that process, that long-standing commitment to the “Open Door,” represent a liberal drive for free trade? In reality, there was not one but several postwar economic orders. As Michael Lind cautions: Globalization on a large scale, characterized by the emergence of transnational corporations and supply chains, got underway only in the 1990s and 2000s. Mass immigration to the United States and Europe is also largely a post-Cold War phenomenon. The euro and the Eurozone date back only to 1999. Labor mobility within Europe is also a relatively recent policy. Controversial “megaregional” trade pacts like NAFTA, the TPP, and TTIP [Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership], which go beyond old-fashioned tariff reductions to rewrite much domestic legislation, go back only to the 1990s.36 Niall Ferguson, too, observes that “truly free trade, truly free capital flows and large-scale migration across borders did not begin until the 1990s.”37 Earlier decades saw capital controls, fixed exchange rates, and periodic returns to tariff barriers. One major pillar of the postwar order was U.S. ally, democratic Japan. Under U.S. military protection, that same country instituted, in the words of Claremont McKenna College’s Leon Hollerman, “the most restrictive foreign trade and foreign-exchange control system ever devised by a major free nation.”38 The long-running competition with the Soviet Union moved the United States to deliberately encourage the economic growth of its Asian allies, but under the shield of a neomercantilist state. In other words, in identifying the U.S.-led order with market and trade liberalization, nostalgists historicize what are in fact a quite recent set of post-1989 international arrangements. From this perspective, a liberal order did arrive, only it came later, in the age of post-1989 unipolarity. There is a more basic defect in recollections of the liberal order. During the postwar era, the United States persistently flouted liberal economic principles and imposed restrictive measures when it suited. Indeed, major powers have not historically risen through free trade and passive governments. Ascending powers have typically risen partly through the deliberate, visible, and intervening hand of an activist state.39 So too with America. All U.S. presidents have had to manage the tension between the commitment to the “Open Door” and the demand for industrial protection at home. The subsidy, the tariff, the quota, and the bilateral voluntary-restriction agreement have remained part of America’s repertoire. As a recent study of global data by Gowling WLG reveals, the United States is a “long-term and prolific proponent of protectionist policies,” and the world order it presides over is notably protectionist.40 Since the 2008 financial crisis, the United States has imposed tariffs worth $39 billion, while the world’s top 60 economies have adopted more than 7,000 protectionist trade measures worth more than $400 billion. The United States and the European Union both accounted for the highest number of protectionist measures, each exercising more than 1,000, with India a distant third at 400.41 America’s trade protectionism has the highest impact on other countries. Foreign farmers would be baffled by the claim that the old order embodied free trade, when the United States persistently granted agricultural subsidies and other mechanisms limiting foreign governments’ access to U.S. consumers.42 The reversion to protectionism has precedents from before the global financial crisis. Some of the most strident advocates of open markets and the dismantling of trade barriers have in practice done the opposite. One was President Ronald Reagan. Reagan had championed the cause of free trade as a foundation of progress and peace. Yet as president, he increased the proportion of imports subject to restrictions by 100 percent from 1980, as well as tightened quotas, introduced “voluntary restraint agreements” and new duties, raised tariffs, and strengthened the Export-Import Bank in order to protect the recovery of U.S. industries, especially automotive, computer-chip, and steel.43 Reagan justified these steps on the grounds that he was forcing economic competitors to trade freely. Regardless, his policies were a long way from Adam Smith. President Clinton also championed free trade, in words and deeds. He drove through NAFTA, a free trade zone uniting North America’s three largest economies, and pushed for China’s admission to the WTO under “most favored nation” status. Yet under Clinton, rice subsidies that continued during his administration enabled U.S. growers to dump their product onto the markets of vulnerable rural countries such as Haiti, Ghana, and Indonesia at depressed prices. Clinton has since apologized to Haiti for the devastation that these arrangements inflicted on the country.44 President George W. Bush emulated Reagan rhetorically, invoking the principles of free trade and unfettered markets. Yet in 2002, he increased steel tariffs by 30 percent, only to back down 20 months later under threat of punitive countertariffs by the European Union, a protectionist bloc in its relations with many countries beyond its borders. Confronted with the prospect of economic meltdown in the crisis of 2008, Bush intervened in the market with strongly protectionist measures, including bailouts of major firms, claiming, “I have abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.”45 The reintroduction of protectionist measures today, then, is not such a sudden or radical departure as is sometimes claimed, though Trump’s open enthusiasm for a “trade war” does mark a difference. There is a defensible logic to the position that in order to practice free trade a country needs a viable economy to practice it with. Reagan and Bush’s contortions on the issue reflect the inherent difficulty of liberal projects, whose architects often feel impelled to compromise with illiberal pressures. A world where even the most avowed exponents of free trade continually resorted to protectionism, though arguably more free and liberal than what had gone before or than what might have prevailed otherwise, was still not the “flat” free-market capitalist world we are being invited to be nostalgic for. Nostalgists claim that one dividend of American hegemony has been the economic liberalization of the globe, or large parts of it. They could point, for example, to the transformation of China into a wealthy capitalist economy that has lifted its population out of “a dollar a day” poverty. But this liberalizing process is more conflicted than potted histories suggest. Beijing achieved rapid industrial revolution and the movement of its workforce from the field into the factory through authoritarian and illiberal measures: involuntary-resettlement urbanization schemes, population control through forced abortion and compulsory sterilization, severe working conditions, repression of civil society, including trade unions, labor, and human-rights activists, and internet surveillance, among other measures. The People’s Republic has consistently ranked low on the Freedom Index.46 A more direct application of U.S.-backed liberalism happened in Russia. After communist rule collapsed in 1991, at the urging and advice of the United States’ government and economists, Moscow embarked on a program of “shock therapy” to restructure Russia around the principle of market exchange, adopting accelerated privatization of state industries, deregulation, fiscal discipline, and the shedding of price controls. This experiment was a major effort in the project to enlarge the global liberal order at a rapid clip. It had the support of the leading institutions of global capitalism, the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. Treasury Department. Harvard academic Jeffrey Sachs, one of Russian liberalization’s architects from 1991 to 1993, set out the program’s logic in The Economist, a journal that champions the cause of the liberal world order. “To clean up the shambles left by communist mismanagement, Eastern Europe must take a swift, dramatic leap to private ownership and a market system. West Europeans must help it do so.”47 “Swift, dramatic leap,” a vast program grounded in classical liberal economics, took on the tempo and zeal of the revolutionary communism it aimed to replace. These rapid reforms replaced an oppressive and failed communist system. They did so at Washington’s continual insistence that Russia reform itself on “our conditions.” But the results on many measures were disastrous: capital flight and deep recession; slumping industrial production; malnutrition; the rise of criminality — a criminalized economy, in fact — intertwined with a corrupt oligarchy enjoying a concentration of wealth; and the decline of health care and an increased rate of premature deaths.48 As Nobel laureate and former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz observed, by eschewing the more gradualist path of Poland or China, the consequences of the program were profoundly illiberal.49 “Liberal order” visionaries are quick to give their ideas credit for the prosperity of nations from Western Europe to the Pacific Rim, finding causation in correlation. They deny such a direct link between their ideas and the problems of post-Soviet Russia.50 Yet it is hard to accept that measures like sudden privatization and the rise of monopolies in a corrupt country were not related to asset stripping and capital flight or that “eliminating the housing and utilities subsidies that sustained tens of millions of impoverished families” did not play a major part in the social ruin that followed.51 Western technocrats, diplomats, and politicians were deeply implicated in the new order’s design. Lamentations for the end of the liberal order are also heard in the realm of “hard” security. The U.S. hegemon, nostalgists warn, is losing (or has lost) the political will to underwrite the international system through a commitment to permanent alliances and to intervene to bring order out of chaos. Part of the current intellectual confusion flows from the conflation of liberalism, which is supposedly peaceable, consensual, and benign, with the process of “world ordering.” It is here that defenders of the old order present their most misleadingly anodyne account of history. A review of the actual experience of the past 70 years suggests that the process of “world ordering” must at times be coercive. For all the attractions of American hegemony abroad, there has also been resistance and imposition. To understand how the superpower met that resistance and imposed itself, we must go beyond the romanticized postwar moment of Trumanite internationalism in the late 1940s. Consider both ends of the chronology as it is usually presented, from 1945 until the recent past. Admirers trace the restructuring of international life in that first year to the visionary institution building that President Truman oversaw amid World War II, such as the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco and its main creation, the UN Charter. In this rendering, the founders conceived the liberal order through a collaborative process of institution building. The narrative is strikingly nonviolent. In fact, to create the conditions for that visionary world making, the liberal order was conceived in blood. Only months later, the same U.S. president launched two atomic strikes on Imperial Japan, immolating and irradiating two of its cities after blockade, firebombing, and starvation had not broken its will. He did so to put down an adversary that had been brutally pursuing a rival vision for an Asian order of its own. In order to create an order, Washington swept aside a competitor by introducing a genocidal weapon into the world. There are powerful arguments that this was the “least bad” choice available.52 Tellingly, though, in panegyrics for a dying liberalism, the words “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” hardly appear. If there were liberal principles that underpinned the UN as it was founded in 1945, they were at first self-determination and sovereignty rather than democracy and human rights. The world order was hardly born “liberal” in the sense implied today: recall that two of the permanent five members of the UN Security Council were totalitarian communist states, and two of the democracies were managing colonial empires that they would not relinquish for decades. Then and now, modern liberalism is antithetical to the grave exertion of state power still practiced in 58 countries, the death penalty. To be sure, the birth of the post-1945 world order did advance some liberal ideas broadly. The general norm against imperial aggression was one. This, however, was not strong enough to prevent or dislodge China’s seizure of Tibet, the bids of Turkey and Greece to grab Cyprus, Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, India’s occupation of Kashmir and annexation of Goa, Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, or indeed the Soviet Union’s occupation of Eastern Europe. At the other end of the chronology, the present moment, consider that the U.S. hegemon has been waging a “war on terror” against Islamist jihadi groups since the 9/11 attacks of 2001. In pursuing the liberal cause of democratization as an antidote to terror, Washington entered the age of “enhanced interrogation” and preventive war. Now, with new weapons (drones) at hand, Washington conducts a sustained campaign of extrajudicial assassinations, often without the consent of host countries and without seeking formal permission or mandates. It has conducted renditions of suspected terrorists without trial. Reluctant to deal with live captives in indefinite detention, a more liberal president from 2009 increasingly avoided the dilemma by killing them. Meanwhile, whatever benefits it has wrought, American unipolarity was not peaceful or liberalizing for the unipolar power. The first two decades of the unipolar Pax Americana after 1989, which made up less than 10 percent of America’s history, generated 25 percent of the nation’s total time at war. That period is more bellicose by an order of magnitude than the preceding eras of bipolarity and multipolarity, in terms of frequency if not intensity.53 Whether in Iraq and Libya, or now with U.S. assistance to Saudi Arabia’s indiscriminate bombardment of Yemen, this proclivity to continuous war making has not created a “liberal” condition of peaceful order. At home, there is a continuous state of alarm and vigilance, whereby “normality” is permanently suspended by an unending state of exception. This, combined with an encouraged state of paternalism where citizens are encouraged to be passive consumers of events, has helped weaken the checks and balances of the republican Constitution.54Detention without trial, secret, warrantless surveillance, unauthorized wars, torture, covert “black sites” — these are not the obvious features of a robust liberal constitutional order. If large parts of the world have not accepted liberalism in major areas of civic life, neither has the United States. Instead of a full reckoning with diplomatic history, nostalgists frame history around the positive creation of new architectures and schemes. Thus the Marshall Plan (1948-1961) figures centrally in America’s postwar historic mission, based on, as Benn Steil puts it, “the moral primacy of democratic government and free economic exchange.”55 This absolute, almost platonic account of the past has little room for other, less-celebrated events from the same era, such as the British- and U.S.-backed overthrow of Iranian prime ministerMohammad Mossadegh in 1953, deposed despite his commitment to national independence and secular democracy. In this picture, the violence and compromises of hegemony, moral and strategic, almost vanish. Nostalgia for the liberal order also overlooks the reality that it was enforced through coercion. In the same era, a defining episode in the postwar assertion of American hegemony was the Suez crisis of 1956. In that hinge event of the Anglo-American relationship, the U.S. Sixth Fleet stalked and harassed British ships in the Mediterranean, fouling their radar and sonar, menacing them with aircraft and lighting them up at night with searchlights.56 With the British pound and oil supplies under pressure, President Dwight Eisenhower threatened Britain with the simple formula of “no ceasefire: no loans.” Patronage could be rapidly withdrawn, regardless of recent history, blood ties, or shared visions of Western-enforced order. The United States enforced its interpretation of that order by targeting its ally’s vitals.57 Between those two moments in time, the United States practiced geopolitics ruthlessly. It partly did so in the course of its long security competition with the Soviet Union. Strikingly, the Cold War as it was actually conducted and lived — where two superpowers did not allow rules, sovereignty, multilateralism, and institutions to constrain them when the stakes were high — does not occupy a prominent place in the mytho-history. Hardly anywhere in nostalgic reminiscences do there appear the numerous coups that were sponsored or supported by Washington. These interventions linked to the United States since 1945 may or may not have been defensible. They certainly violated one of the claimed core principles of “liberal,” “rules-based” order, that of self-determination. The United States not only overthrew governments (sometimes democratically elected ones) — or attempted to — in Albania, Ghana, Guatemala, Greece, Cuba, Chile, Iran, El Salvador, Nicaragua, South Vietnam, Argentina, and Grenada. It also supported violently illiberal forces, from Islamist mujahideen in Afghanistan-Pakistan and President Hosni Mubarak’s oppressive state in Egypt to the Indonesian Suharto regime and its death squads. A mainstay of U.S. hegemony in the Persian Gulf is its partnership with Saudi Arabia, an absolutist state that beheads apostates and survives by making concessions to Wahhabi theocrats. It is currently waging a brutal campaign against rebels in Yemen that, according to Amnesty International, includes attacks that are “indiscriminate, disproportionate or directed against civilians and civilian objects, including funeral gatherings, schools, markets, residential areas and civilian boats.”58 NATO allies on the European continent for decades included authoritarian Portugal and Greece. West Germany, the poster child of the liberal order, did not have elections during its first four years, and its proud social democracy retained officials who had been security elites in the Third Reich.59 Former Nazi mandarins stuffed the highest levels of government, including the Foreign Office and the Interior and Justice Ministries. Several former Nazi generals would later become senior commanders in the Bundeswehr. And in the 1948 Italian elections, the CIA helped ensure the electoral defeat of communists by funding anti-communist parties, forging documents to discredit the Communist Party, and warning Italians that if they publicly supported the party they would be barred from entering the United States. For the sake of liberalism in the long term, the United States exercised its privileges. If the deliberate subversion of a democratic election abroad with “fake news,” bribes, and coercion represents the antithesis of liberal world order, as Trump’s critics now suggest, then Washington attacked that order in the period of its creation. Coups, partisan electoral interventions, the cooptation of illiberal actors, and the flouting of international law made American hegemony unexceptional. In dismantling the power of old European colonial empires, the United States erected a form of domination that had an imperial quality of its own. Consider one of its more ambitious ventures in liberal ordering: the invasion and remaking of Iraq. The occupiers of Iraq regarded themselves as liberators. After invasion, though, the United States also projected power over Iraq’s interior governance in imperial fashion and with a liberal program, with all the tensions this implies. Director of the Coalition Provisional Authority Paul Bremer applied a program of rapid liberalization not only through the well-known de-Ba’athification and disbanding of the Iraqi Army, but through the order for “the full privatization of public enterprises, full ownership rights by foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, full repatriation of foreign profits … the opening of Iraq’s banks to foreign control, national treatment for foreign companies and … the elimination of nearly all trade barriers.”60 The United States continued to impose itself on Iraqi politics when it wanted, demanding and receiving the resignation of elected prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari in May 2007. Intended to implant market democracy, these measures infringed the country’s sovereign democratic will. In other words, the liberators were freeing the Iraqis to conform with the occupier’s preferences. It remains hard to have an empire without imperialism. Yet many visions of liberal order erase the historical process of imperialism, decentering, as Jeanne Morefield argues, “imperial violence while simultaneously positing the necessity of imperial action.”61 If liberalism at a basic level is an enlightenment project committed to liberty, equality, and limitations on state power, and if “world ordering” requires imperialist power projection, it is hard to fuse them without friction. Some may conclude from this historical record that, in the history of American hegemonic “world ordering,” liberalism was missing in action. On each occasion, critics have accused the United States of betraying its own liberal traditions in the pursuit of power. But it is hard to believe that a republic whose leaders so often and so intensely enunciate liberal principles is really driven by secret, amoral cynicism. A more troubling possibility should be considered. Liberalism is a powerful engine of American statecraft, but that statecraft often violates liberal principles. As a dogma of foreign policy, liberalism is jealous, intolerant, and messianic. Applied unchecked, it leads to its own illiberal opposite.62 The practitioners of rough geopolitics were not necessarily hypocrites. They often believed they were serving the ultimate cause of forging a liberal peace under American oversight but that to do so they had to accommodate illiberal allies and pitilessly destroy liberalism’s enemies. In this way, a superpower attempting to create a liberal order permits itself to employ unsentimental methods. Thus in February 2017, David Petraeus could recall sincerely that “to protect freedom here at home, we adopted a foreign policy that sought to protect and, where possible, promote freedom abroad, along with human rights and rule of law,” invoking American values such as “political pluralism” and “a free and open society.”63 Yet as commander in Iraq, Petraeus sought to reverse that country’s implosion and salvage victory by compromising these standards. To that fight, he brought pragmatic, byzantine divide-and-exploit methods, paying for the defection of former Iraqi insurgents and working with Shia paramilitary units not known for their commitment to the Hague conventions. As director of the CIA, Petraeus advocated and implemented a campaign of “signature” drone strikes, whereby the assailant knowingly targets a group gathering — at a funeral for an al Qaeda member, for instance — because of their suspicious behavior and association, rather than through verified identification of the presence of individual persons. Such strikes, therefore, can also threaten noncombatants and the innocent.64 To bolster the struggling rebellion in Syria, Petraeus later in 2015 advocated luring away and recruiting “opportunistic” members of the jihadist Jabhat al-Nusra, then formally affiliated with al Qaeda.65 This is not the place to arbitrate the wisdom and legitimacy of such measures. Dealing with conflicts in such places is a choice of agonies, and no doubt Petraeus and his peers regard themselves as guarding Americans while they sleep and trafficking with lesser evils to keep greater ones at bay. But note that a senior advocate of liberal order can also advocate measures that risk “crowd killing” and that involve enlistment of members of jihadi terrorist organizations and collaboration with sectarian governments. Champions of liberalism must somehow navigate their ideals through the illiberal demands of warfare. Nostalgists for the liberal order also betray a shallow conception of their central idea, liberalism. They conflate liberalism with other desirable phenomena, like capitalism and democracy. They neglect the possibility of illiberal democracy, and illiberal capitalism. Majority democratic rule does not equate with, or necessarily produce, a liberal protection of individual rights such as the presumption of innocence or trial by jury, a liberal tolerance for opposition and dissent, or a constitutional order that separates powers and constrains government through an independent judiciary or a free press. Capitalism can also be illiberal, as the Chinese Communist Party demonstrates. One of America’s long-term allies, Singapore, evolved as a supervised market democracy that curtailed the right to dissent. South Korea, an ally and protectorate within America’s Asian system, evolved first as a dictatorship under authoritarian founding fathers who were also modernizers, Syngman Rhee and Park Chung Hee. These authoritarians nurtured the chaebol business groups, Hyundai, Daewoo, and Samsung. Free markets took root first as highly protected markets under unfree political conditions. Such contradictions are absent from liberal-order panegyrics. As it is recalled, the “liberal order” embodies the permanent commitment of the United States to alliances and institutions without coercion. A broader historical perspective suggests, however, that Trump’s coercive treatment of allies is less of a break with the past than is often thought. In reality, the United States has often coerced allies with threats of abandonment and punishment.66 In 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles threatened Europe with an “agonizing reappraisal” of alliances. In 1973 and 1974, President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger suspended intelligence and nuclear cooperation with Britain to punish noncooperation over a U.S.-initiated declaration of principles and the privacy of bilateral and UK-European Economic Community discussions. The United States has used the threat of abandonment to persuade allies and clients to cancel their nuclear programs, including West Germany, Japan, and Taiwan, while threatening adversaries with sanctions or preventive war. The demand that European allies shoulder more of the burden of military expenditure has been a staple of U.S. diplomacy, from President Eisenhower to former secretary of defense Robert Gates. Despite Britain spending blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq to support the war on terror and cement its standing in Washington, President Obama made a blunt threat that departing from the European Union would place the UK at the “back of the queue” when seeking a bilateral free trade agreement. Assured commitment to institutions and allies through only positive solidarity is a false memory. This underlines the pattern whereby Washington underwrites a liberal world order not by adhering to its principles but by stepping outside them, practicing punishment, threats, and bribes that it would not accept if directed at itself. In “liberal order” litanies, another persistent claim is that the order was “rules-based.” It was not. Rules exist, and flouting them can have costs. But at critical moments for strong states such as the permanent five members of the UN Security Council, rules proved to be slippery; they were invoked, stretched, arbitrarily altered, or ignored, as interest permitted. The unreality of nostalgic legalism was illustrated in the summer of 2016 by two adversaries who both at different times have appealed to “rules” as the arbiter of international order. China defied the unanimous ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which found against its territorial claims, and continued to expand into the South China Sea and seize disputed waters, islands, and shoals. At the same time, the United States appealed to China to respect the “legally binding” verdict yet had not even ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that it urged China to observe. From ignoring the International Court of Justice over the mining of Nicaraguan harbors in 1986 to bombing Serbia in 1999 without a UN mandate, the United States has infringed on the letter of international law when it has found that other interests or values were compelling. It exercised a vigilante’s privilege. So too did other major powers. For less powerful and emerging states, the writ of liberal order was often remote, as they “routed around” rules to pursue their interests. In this century, Africa, from the Great Lakes region to the Sudan, has seen millions butchered, displaced, and unavenged. The era may have involved greater degrees of “rule following” than earlier eras. But it was not “based” on the observation of rules, at least not for the major powers. To rebrand this fraught history of power politics as an era of rule-bound civility is perverse. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in calling for the conservation, or restoration, of an order on the basis that it represents something better. In this case, though, the nostalgia rests on delusion — about what the world was and what it can be.

Introduction Since becoming the world's most powerful country after the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community. The United States has developed a hegemonic playbook to stage "color revolutions," instigate regional disputes, and even directly launch wars under the guise of promoting democracy, freedom and human rights. Clinging to the Cold War mentality, the United States has ramped up bloc politics and stoked conflict and confrontation. It has overstretched the concept of national security, abused export controls and forced unilateral sanctions upon others. It has taken a selective approach to international law and rules, utilizing or discarding them as it sees fit, and has sought to impose rules that serve its own interests in the name of upholding a "rules-based international order." This report, by presenting the relevant facts, seeks to expose the U.S. abuse of hegemony in the political, military, economic, financial, technological and cultural fields, and to draw greater international attention to the perils of the U.S. practices to world peace and stability and the well-being of all peoples. I. Political Hegemony -- Throwing Its Weight Around The United States has long been attempting to mold other countries and the world order with its own values and political system in the name of promoting democracy and human rights. Instances of U.S. interference in other countries' internal affairs abound. In the name of "promoting democracy," the United States practiced a "Neo-Monroe Doctrine" in Latin America, instigated "color revolutions" in Eurasia, and orchestrated the "Arab Spring" in West Asia and North Africa, bringing chaos and disaster to many countries. In 1823, the United States announced the Monroe Doctrine. While touting an "America for the Americans," what it truly wanted was an "America for the United States." Since then, the policies of successive U.S. governments toward Latin America and the Caribbean Region have been riddled with political interference, military intervention and regime subversion. From its 61-year hostility toward and blockade of Cuba to its overthrow of the Allende government of Chile, U.S. policy on this region has been built on one maxim-those who submit will prosper; those who resist shall perish. The year 2003 marked the beginning of a succession of "color revolutions" -- the "Rose Revolution" in Georgia, the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine and the "Tulip Revolution" in Kyrgyzstan. The U.S. Department of State openly admitted playing a "central role" in these "regime changes." The United States also interfered in the internal affairs of the Philippines, ousting President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. in 1986 and President Joseph Estrada in 2001 through the so-called "People Power Revolutions." In January 2023, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo released his new book Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love. He revealed in it that the United States had plotted to intervene in Venezuela. The plan was to force the Maduro government to reach an agreement with the opposition, deprive Venezuela of its ability to sell oil and gold for foreign exchange, exert high pressure on its economy, and influence the 2018 presidential election. The U.S. exercises double standards on international rules. Placing its self-interest first, the United States has walked away from international treaties and organizations, and put its domestic law above international law. In April 2017, the Trump administration announced that it would cut off all U.S. funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) with the excuse that the organization "supports, or participates in the management of a programme of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization." The United States quit UNESCO twice in 1984 and 2017. In 2017, it announced leaving the Paris Agreement on climate change. In 2018, it announced its exit from the UN Human Rights Council, citing the organization's "bias" against Israel and failure to protect human rights effectively. In 2019, the United States announced its withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to seek unfettered development of advanced weapons. In 2020, it announced pulling out of the Treaty on Open Skies. The United States has also been a stumbling block to biological arms control by opposing negotiations on a verification protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and impeding international verification of countries' activities relating to biological weapons. As the only country in possession of a chemical weapons stockpile, the United States has repeatedly delayed the destruction of chemical weapons and remained reluctant in fulfilling its obligations. It has become the biggest obstacle to realizing "a world free of chemical weapons." The United States is piecing together small blocs through its alliance system. It has been forcing an "Indo-Pacific Strategy" onto the Asia-Pacific region, assembling exclusive clubs like the Five Eyes, the Quad and AUKUS, and forcing regional countries to take sides. Such practices are essentially meant to create division in the region, stoke confrontation and undermine peace. The U.S. arbitrarily passes judgment on democracy in other countries, and fabricates a false narrative of "democracy versus authoritarianism" to incite estrangement, division, rivalry and confrontation. In December 2021, the United States hosted the first "Summit for Democracy," which drew criticism and opposition from many countries for making a mockery of the spirit of democracy and dividing the world. In March 2023, the United States will host another "Summit for Democracy," which remains unwelcome and will again find no support. II. Military Hegemony -- Wanton Use of Force The history of the United States is characterized by violence and expansion. Since it gained independence in 1776, the United States has constantly sought expansion by force: it slaughtered Indians, invaded Canada, waged a war against Mexico, instigated the American-Spanish War, and annexed Hawaii. After World War II, the wars either provoked or launched by the United States included the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, the Libyan War and the Syrian War, abusing its military hegemony to pave the way for expansionist objectives. In recent years, the U.S. average annual military budget has exceeded 700 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 40 percent of the world's total, more than the 15 countries behind it combined. The United States has about 800 overseas military bases, with 173,000 troops deployed in 159 countries. According to the book America Invades: How We've Invaded or been Militarily Involved with almost Every Country on Earth, the United States has fought or been militarily involved with almost all the 190-odd countries recognized by the United Nations with only three exceptions. The three countries were "spared" because the United States did not find them on the map. As former U.S. President Jimmy Carter put it, the United States is undoubtedly the most warlike nation in the history of the world. According to a Tufts University report, "Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A new Dataset on U.S. Military Interventions, 1776-2019," the United States undertook nearly 400 military interventions globally between those years, 34 percent of which were in Latin America and the Caribbean, 23 percent in East Asia and the Pacific, 14 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and 13 percent in Europe. Currently, its military intervention in the Middle East and North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa is on the rise. Alex Lo, a South China Morning Post columnist, pointed out that the United States has rarely distinguished between diplomacy and war since its founding. It overthrew democratically elected governments in many developing countries in the 20th century and immediately replaced them with pro-American puppet regimes. Today, in Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan and Yemen, the United States is repeating its old tactics of waging proxy, low-intensity, and drone wars. U.S. military hegemony has caused humanitarian tragedies. Since 2001, the wars and military operations launched by the United States in the name of fighting terrorism have claimed over 900,000 lives with some 335,000 of them civilians, injured millions and displaced tens of millions. The 2003 Iraq War resulted in some 200,000 to 250,000 civilian deaths, including over 16,000 directly killed by the U.S. military, and left more than a million homeless. The United States has created 37 million refugees around the world. Since 2012, the number of Syrian refugees alone has increased tenfold. Between 2016 and 2019, 33,584 civilian deaths were documented in the Syrian fightings, including 3,833 killed by U.S.-led coalition bombings, half of them women and children. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) reported on 9 November 2018 that the air strikes launched by U.S. forces on Raqqa alone killed 1,600 Syrian civilians. The two-decades-long war in Afghanistan devastated the country. A total of 47,000 Afghan civilians and 66,000 to 69,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers unrelated to the September 11 attacks were killed in U.S. military operations, and more than 10 million people were displaced. The war in Afghanistan destroyed the foundation of economic development there and plunged the Afghan people into destitution. After the "Kabul debacle" in 2021, the United States announced that it would freeze some 9.5 billion dollars in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank, a move considered as "pure looting." In September 2022, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu commented at a rally that the United States has waged a proxy war in Syria, turned Afghanistan into an opium field and heroin factory, thrown Pakistan into turmoil, and left Libya in incessant civil unrest. The United States does whatever it takes to rob and enslave the people of any country with underground resources. The United States has also adopted appalling methods in war. During the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War, the United States used massive quantities of chemical and biological weapons as well as cluster bombs, fuel-air bombs, graphite bombs and depleted uranium bombs, causing enormous damage on civilian facilities, countless civilian casualties and lasting environmental pollution. III. Economic Hegemony -- Looting and Exploitation After World War II, the United States led efforts to set up the Bretton Woods System, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which, together with the Marshall Plan, formed the international monetary system centered around the U.S. dollar. In addition, the United States has also established institutional hegemony in the international economic and financial sector by manipulating the weighted voting systems, rules and arrangements of international organizations including "approval by 85 percent majority," and its domestic trade laws and regulations. By taking advantage of the dollar's status as the major international reserve currency, the United States is basically collecting "seigniorage" from around the world; and using its control over international organizations, it coerces other countries into serving America's political and economic strategy. The United States exploits the world's wealth with the help of "seigniorage." It costs only about 17 cents to produce a 100 dollar bill, but other countries had to pony up 100 dollar of actual goods in order to obtain one. It was pointed out more than half a century ago, that the United States enjoyed exorbitant privilege and deficit without tears created by its dollar, and used the worthless paper note to plunder the resources and factories of other nations. The hegemony of U.S. dollar is the main source of instability and uncertainty in the world economy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States abused its global financial hegemony and injected trillions of dollars into the global market, leaving other countries, especially emerging economies, to pay the price. In 2022, the Fed ended its ultra-easy monetary policy and turned to aggressive interest rate hike, causing turmoil in the international financial market and substantial depreciation of other currencies such as the Euro, many of which dropped to a 20-year low. As a result, a large number of developing countries were challenged by high inflation, currency depreciation and capital outflows. This was exactly what Nixon's secretary of the treasury John Connally once remarked, with self-satisfaction yet sharp precision, that "the dollar is our currency, but it is your problem." With its control over international economic and financial organizations, the United States imposes additional conditions to their assistance to other countries. In order to reduce obstacles to U.S. capital inflow and speculation, the recipient countries are required to advance financial liberalization and open up financial markets so that their economic policies would fall in line with America's strategy. According to the Review of International Political Economy, along with the 1,550 debt relief programs extended by the IMF to its 131 member countries from 1985 to 2014, as many as 55,465 additional political conditions had been attached. The United States willfully suppresses its opponents with economic coercion. In the 1980s, to eliminate the economic threat posed by Japan, and to control and use the latter in service of America's strategic goal of confronting the Soviet Union and dominating the world, the United States leveraged its hegemonic financial power against Japan, and concluded the Plaza Accord. As a result, Yen was pushed up, and Japan was pressed to open up its financial market and reform its financial system. The Plaza Accord dealt a heavy blow to the growth momentum of the Japanese economy, leaving Japan to what was later called "three lost decades." America's economic and financial hegemony has become a geopolitical weapon. Doubling down on unilateral sanctions and "long-arm jurisdiction," the United States has enacted such domestic laws as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, and the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, and introduced a series of executive orders to sanction specific countries, organizations or individuals. Statistics show that U.S. sanctions against foreign entities increased by 933 percent from 2000 to 2021. The Trump administration alone has imposed more than 3,900 sanctions, which means three sanctions per day. So far, the United States had or has imposed economic sanctions on nearly 40 countries across the world, including Cuba, China, Russia, the DPRK, Iran and Venezuela, affecting nearly half of the world's population. "The United States of America" has turned itself into "the United States of Sanctions." And "long-arm jurisdiction" has been reduced to nothing but a tool for the United States to use its means of state power to suppress economic competitors and interfere in normal international business. This is a serious departure from the principles of liberal market economy that the United States has long boasted. IV. Technological Hegemony -- Monopoly and Suppression The United States seeks to deter other countries' scientific, technological and economic development by wielding monopoly power, suppression measures and technology restrictions in high-tech fields. The United States monopolizes intellectual property in the name of protection. Taking advantage of the weak position of other countries, especially developing ones, on intellectual property rights and the institutional vacancy in relevant fields, the United States reaps excessive profits through monopoly. In 1994, the United States pushed forward the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), forcing the Americanized process and standards in intellectual property protection in an attempt to solidify its monopoly on technology. In the 1980s, to contain the development of Japan's semiconductor industry, the United States launched the "301" investigation, built bargaining power in bilateral negotiations through multilateral agreements, threatened to label Japan as conducting unfair trade, and imposed retaliatory tariffs, forcing Japan to sign the U.S.-Japan Semiconductor Agreement. As a result, Japanese semiconductor enterprises were almost completely driven out of global competition, and their market share dropped from 50 percent to 10 percent. Meanwhile, with the support of the U.S. government, a large number of U.S. semiconductor enterprises took the opportunity and grabbed larger market share. The United States politicizes, weaponizes technological issues and uses them as ideological tools. Overstretching the concept of national security, the United States mobilized state power to suppress and sanction Chinese company Huawei, restricted the entry of Huawei products into the U.S. market, cut off its supply of chips and operating systems, and coerced other countries to ban Huawei from undertaking local 5G network construction. It even talked Canada into unwarrantedly detaining Huawei's CFO Meng Wanzhou for nearly three years. The United States has fabricated a slew of excuses to clamp down on China's high-tech enterprises with global competitiveness, and has put more than 1,000 Chinese enterprises on sanction lists. In addition, the United States has also imposed controls on biotechnology, artificial intelligence and other high-end technologies, reinforced export restrictions, tightened investment screening, suppressed Chinese social media apps such as TikTok and WeChat, and lobbied the Netherlands and Japan to restrict exports of chips and related equipment or technology to China. The United States has also practiced double standards in its policy on China-related technological professionals. To sideline and suppress Chinese researchers, since June 2018, visa validity has been shortened for Chinese students majoring in certain high-tech-related disciplines, repeated cases have occurred where Chinese scholars and students going to the United States for exchange programs and study were unjustifiably denied and harassed, and large-scale investigation on Chinese scholars working in the United States was carried out. The United States solidifies its technological monopoly in the name of protecting democracy. By building small blocs on technology such as the "chips alliance" and "clean network," the United States has put "democracy" and "human rights" labels on high-technology, and turned technological issues into political and ideological issues, so as to fabricate excuses for its technological blockade against other countries. In May 2019, the United States enlisted 32 countries to the Prague 5G Security Conference in the Czech Republic and issued the Prague Proposal in an attempt to exclude China's 5G products. In April 2020, then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the "5G clean path," a plan designed to build technological alliance in the 5G field with partners bonded by their shared ideology on democracy and the need to protect "cyber security." The measures, in essence, are the U.S. attempts to maintain its technological hegemony through technological alliances. The United States abuses its technological hegemony by carrying out cyber attacks and eavesdropping. The United States has long been notorious as an "empire of hackers," blamed for its rampant acts of cyber theft around the world. It has all kinds of means to enforce pervasive cyber attacks and surveillance, including using analog base station signals to access mobile phones for data theft, manipulating mobile apps, infiltrating cloud servers, and stealing through undersea cables. The list goes on. U.S. surveillance is indiscriminate. All can be targets of its surveillance, be they rivals or allies, even leaders of allied countries such as former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and several French Presidents. Cyber surveillance and attacks launched by the United States such as "Prism," "Dirtbox," "Irritant Horn" and "Telescreen Operation" are all proof that the United States is closely monitoring its allies and partners. Such eavesdropping on allies and partners has already caused worldwide outrage. Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, a website that has exposed U.S. surveillance programs, said that "do not expect a global surveillance superpower to act with honor or respect. There is only one rule: there are no rules." V. Cultural Hegemony -- Spreading False Narratives The global expansion of American culture is an important part of its external strategy.

Does this argument mean that liberal hegemony was the right course after all, and that a more sophisticated version should be adopted should the United States ever find itself in a position of primacy again? I don’t think so. The flaw in the counterfactual described above should be obvious. It assumes that if policymakers in previous years had perfect knowledge of the results of their actions, then they could infallibly pick the right course of action at each critical point. Armed with perfect foresight, for example, former U.S. President George W. Bush would not have chosen to invade Iraq in 2003, or perhaps he would have devoted a lot more time and effort into preparing for the post-Saddam occupation. Yet even perfect knowledge about what went wrong would not guarantee success the second time around. First, even when we know what mistakes to avoid, there may not be any course of action that would yield a successful outcome. The United States is very powerful, wealthy, and secure, but some tasks may simply be beyond its means and outside the limits of its understanding. Trying to use military force to transform deeply divided societies into liberal democracies seems to be one of them. Second, if the United States had taken a significantly different course of action at various critical points in the recent past, then history would have headed in a different direction and U.S. leaders would have faced a wholly different set of choices whose results could not be known in advance. In other words, the lessons drawn from events as they actually occurred may not help the United States decide what to do once history is following a different path. Most importantly, even liberal hegemony lite entails a lot of complicated social engineering. By definition, a liberal world order is one where certain key political principles—democracy; sovereignty; low barriers to trade, investment, and travel; rule of law within multilateral institutions; and individual rights) are nearly universal. But we live in a world where these values are not universally embraced. Democracies have never been a majority, and millions of people think security, sovereignty, cultural values, national autonomy, and other political goals are more important—which means that trying to get others to embrace democracy requires considerable pressure and increases the risk of political instability. Such efforts inevitably trigger local resentments of various kinds, especially in a world where nationalism and other forms of local identity make people resentful and suspicious of even well-intentioned foreign interference. Furthermore, the more far-reaching the changes occurring among any group of people, the more unpredictable the results will be and the more unintended consequences are bound to arise. Even progressive political change creates winners and losers, and the latter won’t necessarily accept their fates with forbearance. Instead, they may take up arms to try to regain their former positions, thereby creating the sort of resistance that helped defeat U.S. efforts to promote a liberal order in the past. Even if future policymakers avoided all of the errors made between 1992 and 2016 (to say nothing of the blunders U.S. President Donald Trump has made since then), we may be confident they will mishandle some of the unforeseen developments that are bound to arise on their watch.

That the first attempt was a costly failure should be beyond dispute. Instead of advancing, democracy has been in retreat around the world for more than a decade—including in the United States itself—and U.S.-led efforts at regime change have led not to thriving democracies but to failed states and costly occupations. Hyperglobalization under U.S. auspices produced a grave financial crisis in 2008, politically painful job displacement in a number of sectors, and helped trigger a wide-ranging populist backlash. NATO enlargement helped poison relations with Russia, and policies such as dual containment in the Persian Gulf inspired anti-U.S. terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks and all the negative consequences that flowed from that event. The end result of these developments has been a partial retreat from globalization, the emergence of would-be autocrats in Hungary, Poland, and even in the United States, and revitalized authoritarianism in many other places. Given where we are today, does it matter whether a more sophisticated version of liberal hegemony might have succeeded? In fact, this issue is of paramount importance, because plenty of people are still convinced that trying to create a U.S.-led, liberal world order was the right goal and that the United States just needs to learn from past mistakes and do it better and smarter in the future. Defenders include unrepentant hawks such as Eric Edelman and Ray Takeyh, who think what the Middle East needs is even more U.S.-led regime change, but also liberal academics such as G. John Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney, who believe the liberal order remains surprisingly resilient. Other proponents of this view are dedicated policy wonks such as Jake Sullivan, who thinks the problem is not the United States’ basic strategy but rather the fact that Americans are increasingly skeptical of it, and one sees similar impulses in the writings of Hal Brands, Peter Feaver, and other defenders of an expansive U.S. role. If former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden wins the presidential election in November—and, to be clear, I hope he does—the apostles of U.S. primacy and its “indispensable” global role will be back in the saddle, and we are likely to see at least a partial attempt to turn the clock back to the halcyon days when the United States was actively trying to create a global liberal order.

If somebody infringes your copyright, you are entitled to file a lawsuit in federal court to enforce your rights. Remedies include obtaining an injunction or restraining order to prevent additional violations, an award of money damages, and possibly attorneys’ fees. The court can also order while an action is pending that any copies that are alleged to be in violation of the copyright owner’s exclusive rights, as well as templates for reproduction and records, be impounded. When making its final orders, the court can order the destruction or disposition of all the infringing copies that violated the copyright owner’s exclusive rights, as well as the templates for reproduction.

The distinction drawn between moral rights and legal rights as two separate categories of rights is of fundamental importance to understanding the basis and potential application of human rights. Legal rights refer to all those rights found within existing legal codes. A legal right is a right that enjoys the recognition and protection of the law. Questions as to its existence can be resolved by simply locating the relevant legal instrument or piece of legislation. A legal right cannot be said to exist prior to its passing into law and the limits of its validity are set by the jurisdiction of the body which passed the relevant legislation. An example of a legal right would be my daughter’s legal right to receive an adequate education, as enshrined within the United Kingdom’s Education Act (1944). Suffice it to say, that the exercise of this right is limited to the United Kingdom. My daughter has no legal right to receive an adequate education from a school board in Southern California. Legal positivists argue that the only rights that can be said to legitimately exist are legal rights, rights that originate within a legal system. On this view, moral rights are not rights in the strict sense, but are better thought of as moral claims, which may or may not eventually be assimilated within national or international law. For a legal positivist, such as the 19th. Century legal philosopher Jeremy Bentham, there can be no such thing as human rights existing prior to, or independently from legal codification. For a positivist determining the existence of rights is no more complicated than locating the relevant legal statute or precedent. In stark contrast, moral rights are rights that, it is claimed, exist prior to and independently from their legal counterparts. The existence and validity of a moral right is not deemed to be dependent upon the actions of jurists and legislators. Many people argued, for example, that the black majority in apartheid South Africa possessed a moral right to full political participation in that country’s political system, even though there existed no such legal right. What is interesting is that many people framed their opposition to apartheid in rights terms. What many found so morally repugnant about apartheid South Africa was precisely its denial of numerous fundamental moral rights, including the rights not to be discriminated against on grounds of colour and rights to political participation, to the majority of that country’s inhabitants. This particular line of opposition and protest could only be pursued because of a belief in the existence and validity of moral rights. A belief that fundamental rights which may or may not have received legal recognition elsewhere, remained utterly valid and morally compelling even, and perhaps especially, in those countries whose legal systems had not recognized these rights. A rights-based opposition to apartheid South Africa could not have been initiated and maintained by appeal to legal rights, for obvious reasons. No one could legitimately argue that the legal political rights of non-white South Africans were being violated under apartheid, since no such legal rights existed. The systematic denial of such rights did, however, constitute a gross violation of those peoples’ fundamental moral rights.

Legal rights refer to all those rights found within existing legal codes that are protected by law and enforceable. A legal right is a right that enjoys the recognition and protection of the law (enforceable). A legal right cannot be said to exist prior to its passing into law and the limits of its validity are set by the jurisdiction of the body that passed the relevant legislation. An example of a legal right would be women’s right to vote and be voted for in Nigeria, as enshrined in the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Unlike moral rights which are grounded in moral reasons, legal rights derive from the laws of the society, legislature, customary rights that exist by local convention. Legal rights are such that, in theory, if they are violated, violator scan be punished by the criminal system (Omotosho 2017, 6 - 8).