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I argue that there is a strong drive in this subfield for producing scholarship within a frame of origin history. Origin history is geared toward uncovering the true and accurate meaning of a legal rule, concept, or practice at one discrete moment in the past. This may seem to be pure and simple history writing: discovering “what things were really like.” Nevertheless, origin history, like all history writing, has a specific orienting frame. Its guiding principle is locating true and genuine meaning in a privileged past moment. Such perspective assumes constancy—that things are or at least should be as they were—or at the very least, takes little interest in change. The tacit claim of origin history is twofold: to explain and justify. The assumption is that the meaning discovered in the relevant past moment both offers a historical explanation and justifies present choices. Both are false, but my focus here is on the failure of the former. Laying origin history aside, I discuss an alternative frame for writing intellectual property history: the, so called, new history of capitalism. Taking root in American history departments in the last two decades, this approach is fueled by a renewed interest in studying the history of economic relations with an emphasis on the new and distinct system of capitalism.2 There is a close fit between this approach and historical research of intellectual property. This fit is rooted in the fact that the appearance of the field of intellectual property, a distinctly modern construct, coincided with and was an element of the rise of capitalism.3 There is, however, also danger lurking in a common under– standing of several central features of the new history of capitalism approach. The danger is that overemphasis on contingency and constructivism is likely to lead to the conclusion that capitalism is simply whatever random collection of features that political struggles and historical accidents happened to produce. This, in turn, reduces history into description and denies it any explanatory force. By reducing a dynamic and developing set of relations into a constant thing, origin history reifies its object of study. By reducing it to a list of historical accidents, contingency history causes its object to disintegrate. This essay concludes by suggesting that an attractive frame for studying the history of intellectual property is the history of capitalism shorn of its strong contingency drive. Within this frame capitalism, rather than seen as a random collection of accidental forms, supplies a structured and orienting framework. The rise of intellectual property was part of the creation of a new and distinctive set of social relations based on the commodity form and market exchange as a pervasive type of human interaction that radically transformed all aspects of society. I discuss three features that make intellectual property a particularly fitting, as well as somewhat distinctive, object of study within the organizing frame of the history of capitalism: the history of intellectual property understood as the study of the process of commodification applied to the unique subject matter of information; the structural role played by intellectual property in the development of capitalism; and intellectual property as an area where some of the naturalizing assumptions of a market society are prone to float to the surface and occasionally be challenged.

The obvious corporate theory platform that offered itself to accommodate environmental concerns was stakehoderism55; environmental protection was introduced as part of corporate social responsibility (CSR). So, environmentalist critique was initially a factor to be accounted for in the balancing of various interests when distributional decisions are made. This essentially positioned the environment against the main corporate stakeholders - managers, shareholders, workers, and to some extent the state – who were more interested in economic growth and, as described above, dominated the double-movement forces. In this way, environmentalism remained theoretically inside and practically outside the formulation of corporate purpose for a long time. Thus, even though the environment over the years tends to feature more and more in policy-making,56 as far as corporate decision-making is concerned, such concerns are either piecemeal or hypocritical. Indicatively, the Business Roundtable has recently “reversed” its corporate purpose statement, without law reform being necessary, by endorsing stakeholderism and including the commitment to “protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices” as part of CSR. 57 Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine how a corporate board would ever make a decision to resolve the “growth vs environment” trade-off in favour of the latter. Therefore, Bebchuck and Bainbridge’s contention58 that this is mere window dressing and an effort to dilute board responsibility to shareholders is probably correct, though for different reasons to those these two scholars submit.

Environmentalism challenges the very core of capitalism by calling for the sacrifice of economic activity in terms of output growth to the extent it impacts on the environment. In other words, it signifies the insurmountable trade-off between economic growth based on resource extraction and the environment conditions required for humanity’s (and other life forms’) continuity.59 An attack on growth is too radical to be accommodated by capitalism to the extent the latter represents endless accumulation and therefore resource extraction and consumption without limits. Thus, corporate business has been trying to adapt its purpose in way that pays lip service to environmentalism through “greenwashing” practices, but that also exploits the public subsidization of the “green” economy as a unique business opportunity for more growth and material extraction. The clearest illustration of this government-sponsored hypocrisy is the International Energy Agency’s “electric vehicles initiative” which, instead advocating for expanding public transport, aims for the replacement of conventional cars with electric ones. This will at best have a questionable effect on emission reduction and a certain negative impact if materials extraction processes are also accounted for.60

The dramatic expansion of intellectual property rights represents a new stage in commodification that threatens to make virtually everything bad about capitalism even worse. Stronger intellectual property rights will reinforce class differences, undermine science and technology, speed up the corporatization of the university, inundate society in legal disputes, and reduce personal freedoms.We have no precise measure of the extent of intellectual property, but a rough calculation by Marjorie Kelly suggests the magnitude of intellectual property rights. At the end of 1995, the book value of the Standard and Poor (S&P) index of 500 companies accounted for only 26 percent of market value. Intangible assets were worth three times the value of tangible assets.1 Of course, not all intangible assets are intellectual property rights, but a substantial proportion certainly is.While the legal protection of intellectual property might seem inseparable from contemporary global capitalism, until fairly recently capitalists were equivocal about such things. During the first six decades of the nineteenth century, corporations in the United States were not inclined to respect such intellectual property rights. For example, they often paid as little as possible, or nothing at all, to inventors. In addition, the United States did not even recognize international copyrights.The free-marketeers of the nineteenth century vigorously opposed intellectual property rights as feudalistic monopolies. Their view of intellectual property rights mostly dominated political economic opinion in the United States until the massive depression of 1870s weakened faith in market forces. In the context of the economic crisis, business was desperate for anything that would return profits to what they considered to be an acceptable level.At first, business owners tried forming cartels and trusts to hobble competitive forces. In response to vigorous protests, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act. However, corporations were able to use patents, which were perfectly legal, as a convenient loophole to evade the intent of that law. Through patent pools, they could divide up the market and exclude new competitors. In this way, intellectual property rights were important in establishing monopoly capitalism.The strengthening of intellectual property rights accelerated once again as the bloom wore off the post-Second World War “Golden Age” and the United States’ export surplus disappeared. Behind closed doors, corporate leaders successfully lobbied the government to strengthen intellectual property rights that would give advantages to their industries. Just as in the late nineteenth century, business saw property rights as a means of increasing profits when economic conditions began to sour. The public never had a clue about the extent to which the government had given away important rights.

The previous chapters traced the development of racial scripts in and around intellectual property law in the United States. In doing so, they named but did not fully examine, as other scholars have done, the complex relationships between copyrights, patents, and trademarks and (neo)coloniality. That connection is not one that begins with the advent of biopiracy but rather stretches back before American independence to the colonial construction of knowledge itself. Colonial regimes were built, in part, on the devaluation of the intellectual capacity and knowledge production of colonial subjects. Practices of treating non-Europeans as less than human and incapable of producing knowledge were enacted in colonies across the world, including in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, through binary articulation of rationality with Europeanness and intellectual incapacity with Otherness. Ramon Grosfoguel, for instance, writes that “[t]he hegemonic Eurocentric counterexamples, arguing that a learned Black man, in Africa or other colonies, must be “like a parrot.” Not only did Hegel and Hume lay out Enlightenment justifications for slavery and colonialism, but echoes of their words are evident in American rejections of the creatorship of people of color and the non-universality of personhood and creativity.

Enlightenment conceptions of colonial subjects as barbarous, childlike, innocent, and without higher intellectual capacity came to be embedded not only in intellectual property law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in the very logics of global copyright, patent, and trademark law as well. Ruth Okediji observes that, historically speaking, intellectual property law from the nineteenth century onward discriminated against the developing world, centrally building upon the idea that colonial subjects lacked the intellectual sophistication to produce knowledge. She contends:

On the surface, Sean Johnson Andrews’ new book is a timely critique of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) from a critical Marxist perspective. But the true goal of this work goes much deeper into tracing the history of the cultural foundations of the liberal state, private property laws, and labor relations, or what he calls the “reified culture of property.” Regarding the latter, Andrews argues that IPR are only the latest manifestation of this culture. It is an invention functioning like a bandage to hold together the privileged status and power of the capitalist property-owning elite, a power inevitably hemorrhaged by the twin processes of digitization and globalization. In fact, the very existence of IPR, he contends, exposes the fundamental flaws of neoliberal capitalism, presenting us with a unique opportunity. Starting with an examination of IPR, he works backwards to interrogate the ideology developed around notions of value creation and the division of labor which both lie at the very heart of the culture of property.The book opens by positioning the author within the culture of digital piracy in the early 2000s. This is an experience I (and I imagine many others in my generation) could immediately relate to. In those days before streaming services and platforms like YouTube, online file sharing had little to no legal alternatives and provided content not otherwise available, including some significant political content. From Napster to Limewire to BitTorrent, millions of people around the world participated in p2p online file sharing culture, resulting in a certain shifting of values and questioning of the legitimacy of copyright laws and their application to digital content. Like many in this online culture, Andrews views IPR less as a tool to protect the creativity of entrepreneurs and more as a tool to benefit the wealthy and stymie collective culture.Andrews goes on to argue how IPR today are essentially an amalgamation of preexisting copyright, trademark, and patent laws designed to extend the hegemonic Western neoliberal capitalist system which values property above all else, even liberty. He cites Chantal Mouffe’s “democratic paradox” to illustrate that even though the liberal state ostensibly exists to protect individual liberty, “in the balance between liberty and property, property always wins.” (3) Intellectual property is therefore “just another form of private property to be ruthlessly protected by the capital-oriented state,” (3) which can allow for no radical alternative to exist. However, the extension of private property rights to the immaterial realm of ideas and culture actually creates an opening for a broader critique of the culture surrounding property, its social valorization, and the role of the state in its protection. (6)A unique contribution of this book is the way it centers culture in its analysis. The author argues that law itself is a cultural product, thus understanding culture is the key. In Chapter One, he lays out a framework for examining culture at the macro, mezzo, and micro levels. This allows him to show the mediating and synergistic functions of the various levels of culture (e.g. state, media, and individual), through which the culture of property came to be accepted as an unquestioned natural phenomenon in Western societies enshrined in the (neo)liberal state. This contribution alone should be of great interest to scholars of culture.Chapters Two and Three trace the detailed history of this process of “cultural efficacy,” from the Enclosure Movement of the 12th century to the English Civil War in the mid-1600s to the Law and Economics Movement of the 20th century, “to denote the process whereby top-down programs and products gain bottom-up legitimacy.” (39) Put simply, many people today believe the free market to be a naturally occurring sacrosanct “bottom-up” phenomenon, but in reality, it was only one of many competing ideologies which happened to win out over others (such as the proto-Marxist “Levellers” in 16thcentury England) and was protected by the “top-down” coercive force of the liberal state. Describing this history and development of social philosophy and law is where Andrews’s keen knowledge truly shines. Even in such extensive historical analyses, he manages to keep the reader engaged and shows relevance to the present day by framing each chapter in relation to contemporary IPR issues.The author especially focuses on John Locke’s defense of private property as a major justification for the Enclosure Movement and foundation of the reified culture of property. Locke reasoned that farmers could privatize land from the “commons” if they improved it (e.g. converting swamp land into productive farm land). Yet, big plantation farms of the day were based on the labor of appropriation through which the owners, not the individual laborers who worked for them, received all credit for improving the land, and hence for creating value. In Chapter Four, the author applies a Marxist critique to this, pointing out how industrial capitalism extended this idea that individual laborers are less important to the production of value than the owners of the means of production. But today’s digitized “participatory culture” is undermining this logic by valorizing laborers once again as producers of value. Through platforms like YouTube and Wikipedia, everyone is a creator of content, and thus, value. This forces the central argument of the capitalist economic model into question; how is value produced, distributed, and owned?Furthermore, Andrews asserts that this type of online distributed peer production in the Western world mirrors the global distribution of labor in world-systems theory. In Chapter Five, he further addresses globalization, arguing that extending IPR to other countries exposes its limited cultural and historical relevance. Specifically, he analyzes the issue of global copyright piracy, such as local producers selling pirated DVDs in Ecuador or counterfeit blue jeans in Bolivia. Because capitalist production is based on appropriated labor (in this case, from the global South), the foreign (global North) owners claim the value and rewards of the labor of their workers by virtue of owning the brand names. Through such cases, he reveals the hierarchical nature of these labor relations and shows how global piracy can be seen, at least in some cases, as a rebellion against capitalist expropriation of direct producers in the global South.These final two chapters are particularly strong. IPR show exactly how the ideology of free market and private property fails in modern times because digitization and globalization have produced new means of production and creation of value that do not require ownership or capitalist labor relations. It is an invention created to maintain the property rights of the elite in a world where their ideology is being undermined. Ironically, the more that aspects of culture fall under IPR protection, the more opportunities emerge for piracy, threatening both ownership and the legitimacy of the state protecting these unequal rights. Overall, I found this argument effective, cohesive, and to significantly exceed the critical contributions of other scholarship on IPR. With its big-picture view of the political economy, this work will certainly be of interest to digital sociologists and to those who study IPR, digital rights activism, online piracy, and other related issues.In addition to this impressive feat of contextualizing IPR in the history of the reified culture of property, the most important contribution of this book is Andrews’ engagement with what he calls the “balanced” IPR critics. This includes scholars such as Lawrence Lessig who have led the debate challenging IPR thus far. Lessig was instrumental in establishing the Creative Commons license and his work, such as Free Culture, has been a major inspiration for the Digital Rights movement. These scholars criticize the IPR “maximalists” who seek total and complete privatization and market incorporation of all immaterial culture. Yet, as Andrews points out, they largely have challenged IPR without challenging the dogma of the inviolable right of property. They critique the maximalist position while still upholding the reified culture of property by framing intellectual property as technologically unique from material property and thus requiring different rules.Andrews engages with this debate consistently throughout the book. He asserts that, rather than treating immaterial culture as unique, “there is continuity in the enclosure of both material and immaterial property.” (26)Therefore, the same arguments Lessig quite effectively applied to defending immaterial culture from IPR can be pushed even further to expose the fundamental flaws of capitalism. In other words, IPR “maximalists” are challenging the continuum of property from the wrong direction; they need to start closer to the source (i.e. global neoliberal capitalism).  Whether or not you agree with the Marxist view of private property rights, this is certainly the most interesting challenge of Lessig’s scholarship I have ever come across, and Andrews makes a valid and effective case. Lessig’s contradictory views on property (which Andrews shows in detail) in some ways show how deeply engrained this reified culture of property is. Nevertheless, the author acknowledges that the Free Culture movement has renewed visibility of the social production of value, and calls for an even more comprehensive movement which centralizes people’s identity as laborers (class) and thus addresses the fundamental flaws of the culture of property and neoliberal state. In doing so, he argues it would also solve issues of white male supremacy and economic precarity associated with the recent wave of far-right populism and fascism around the world. On the other hand, Andrews is careful to critique moderate “balanced” IPR critics while remaining supportive of the activism it has inspired, avoiding stoking conflicts between moderate and radical leftists. As a social movement scholar, I appreciate this nuanced approach. My only criticism is that he does not engage more with extant scholarship on social movements addressing IPR. For instance, Gabriella Coleman’s Coding Freedom and Hector Postigo’s The Digital Rights Movementboth explore the collective resistance happening to IPR at the grassroots level which often goes beyond the moderate, “balanced” perspective the author addresses. Counter-hegemonic culture felt like a missing piece in this picture. Also, as the author acknowledges at the end, there is little attention to the role of intersectional issues including race, gender, and sexuality. The Marxist focus on class above all else can sometimes function to silence other identities, and this lack of solidarity needs to be solved before a movement, the type of which the author proposes, can emerge.

The dramatic expa nsion of intellectual property rights represents a new stage in commodification that threatens to make virtually everything bad about capitalism even worse. Stronger intellectual property rights will reinforce class differences, undermine science and technology, speed up the corporatization of the university, inundate society in legal disputes, and reduce personal freedoms.We have no precise measure of the extent of intellectual property, but a rough calculation by Marjorie Kelly suggests the magnitude of intellectual property rights. At the end of 1995, the book value of the Standard and Poor (S&P) index of 500 companies accounted for only 26 percent of market value. Intangible assets were worth three times the value of tangible assets.1 Of course, not all intangible assets are intellectual property rights, but a substantial proportion certainly is. While the legal protection of intellectual property might seem inseparable from contemporary global capitalism, until fairly recently capitalists were equivocal about such things. During the first six decades of the nineteenth century, corporations in the United States were not inclined to respect such intellectual property rights. For example, they often paid as little as possible, or nothing at all, to inventors. In addition, the United States did not even recognize international copyrights. The free-marketeers of the nineteenth century vigorously opposed intellectual property rights as feudalistic monopolies. Their view of intellectual property rights mostly dominated political economic opinion in the United States until the massive depression of 1870s weakened faith in market forces. In the context of the economic crisis, business was desperate for anything that would return profits to what they considered to be an acceptable level. At first, business owners tried forming cartels and trusts to hobble competitive forces. In response to vigorous protests, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act. However, corporations were able to use patents, which were perfectly legal, as a convenient loophole to evade the intent of that law. Through patent pools, they could divide up the market and exclude new competitors. In this way, intellectual property rights were important in establishing monopoly capitalism. The strengthening of intellectual property rights accelerated once again as the bloom wore off the post-Second World War “Golden Age” and the United States’ export surplus disappeared. Behind closed doors, corporate leaders successfully lobbied the government to strengthen intellectual property rights that would give advantages to their industries. Just as in the late nineteenth century, business saw property rights as a means of increasing profits when economic conditions began to sour. The public never had a clue about the extent to which the government had given away important rights. The Bizarre World of Intellectual Property Rights Today, intellectual property rights claims go far beyond patent protection for useful inventions and copyrights for new music. Some claims are so outlandish that they would be humorous if the courts did not take them so seriously. For example, lawyers are now suggesting that athletes should patent the way they shoot a basket or catch a pass.2 The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), ever on the lookout for more royalties, was about to sue the Girl Scouts for singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and other songs around campfires until adverse publicity caused it to relent.3 On the same day that the Girl Scout article appeared, a Wall Street Journal article reported that the National Basketball Association was engaged in a suit against America Online over the transmission of game scores and statistics from NBA games in progress.4 In another case, someone, in all seriousness, patented the correct way of lifting a box.5 In one remarkable case, a patient found that his doctor had patented genetic material from the patient’s own body without informing him. The patient sued for compensation, but the courts upheld the doctor’s rights to the intellectual property encoded in the patient’s genes.6 Absurd claims to informational property rights have been expanding by leaps and bounds. People have successfully convinced the Patent and Trademark Office to grant property rights for everything from colors to a specific number.7 The Patent and Trademark Office even registered the “frowny” emoticon as a trademark of Despair.com. Ralph Lauren won a victory in an appeals court in 2000, when his lawyers forced a magazine, begun in 1975 as the official publication of the U.S. Polo Association, to change its name because Lauren claimed the word “Polo” as intellectual property.8 In a similar case, when educators at the Australian Institute of Management listed a twenty-year-old course, “Effective Negotiation Skills,” on the organization’s Web site, a United States training group, Karrass, told the institute to take the course description off the site because Karrass has a U.S. trademark over the expressions “effective negotiating,” “advanced effective negotiating,” and “effective sales negotiating.”9 One critic of the patent system even succeeded in winning a patent for Kirchoff’s law, a scientific principle first developed in 1845, proving that the electric current flowing into a function equals the current flowing out.10 If an individual critic of the patent system is able to manipulate the Patent and Trademark Office into registering such ridiculous claims, think of how much profit-maximizing corporations, with enormous resources available for research and legal expenses, are able to stake out as private property. To illustrate this point, Richard Stallman, winner of a MacArthur “genius” award, challenged Bruce Lehman, then head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, at a contentious meeting. Stallman produced a voluminous, unwieldy printout of a computer program he had written earlier with several colleagues. He explained that the program was currently in use on more than a million computers, including those of the U.S. Air Force and major companies, such as Intel and Motorola. “Just a few lines of code can be enough to infringe a patent, and this compiler has ten thousand pages,” Stallman said, gesturing to the document. “How many patents does it infringe? I don’t know. Nobody does. Perhaps you can read the code and tell me?” he challenged Mr. Lehman.11 The Dual Economy Intellectual property rights change the nature of competition. Most industries that do not enjoy the protection of intellectual property rights find themselves involved in intense competition, which lowers their profits. In contrast, companies with intellectual property rights face limited competition and can enjoy elevated profits. For example, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan recently told Congress: “Indeed, a striking feature of the current cyclical episode relative to many earlier ones has been the virtual absence of pricing power across much of American business, as increasing globalization and deregulation have enhanced competition. In this low-inflation environment, firms have perceived very little ability to pass cost increases on to customers.”12 Let us decode the Chairman’s words. For agricultural products, steel, and other commodity-like goods with no intellectual property protection, competitive forces put powerful pressure on profits. If the entire economy were like those industries, a severe crisis would engulf it. In particular, those industries that depended on intellectual property would tend to be especially vulnerable. Reproduction costs for software, pharmaceuticals, or movies are trivial. In the language of economics, marginal costs are small and fixed costs are high. Without the legal protection of intellectual property rights, strong competition in such industries would mean certain bankruptcy. Consequently, monopoly in these sectors is essential, and monopoly is made possible by intellectual property rights protection. A few years earlier, Greenspan was emphasizing a different part of the economy, breathlessly rhapsodizing about a weightless economy: The world of 1948 was vastly different from the world of 1996. The American economy, more then than now, was viewed as the ultimate in technology and productivity in virtually all fields of economic endeavor. The quintessential model of industrial might in those days was the array of vast, smoke-encased integrated steel mills in the Pittsburgh district and on the shores of Lake Michigan. Output was things, big physical things. Virtually unimaginable a half-century ago was the extent to which concepts and ideas would substitute for physical resources and human brawn in the production of goods and services. In 1948 radios were still being powered by vacuum tubes. Today, transistors deliver far higher quality with a mere fraction of the bulk. Fiber-optics has [sic] replaced huge tonnages of copper wire, and advances in architectural and engineering design have made possible the construction of buildings with much greater floor space but significantly less physical material than the buildings erected just after World War II. Accordingly, while the weight of current economic output is probably only modestly higher than it was a half-century ago, value added, adjusted for price change, has risen well over threefold.13 Over and above the obvious exaggeration, Greenspan’s words here appeal to the marvels of high technology. But the so-called weightless economy has more to do with the legislated powers of intellectual property that the government granted to powerful corporations.14 For example, companies such as Nike, Microsoft, and Pfizer sell stuff that has high value relative to its weight only because their intellectual property rights insulate them from competition. In his more recent testimony, Greenspan noted, however, “a firm is inherently fragile if its value-added emanates more from conceptual as distinct from physical assets.”15 This possibility would be even more terrifying to holders of intellectual property was it not for the powerful protection that the state provides. Not a day goes by when some legislature or some courtroom fails to grant new powers to holders of intellectual property. The Costs of Intellectual Property Rights Intellectual property rights are in the process of corrupting society in a number of ways. First of all, intellectual property rights will reinforce class differences. Worldwide, the rich have become richer to an unimaginable extent in recent years. The members of the “Forbes 400,” a compilation of the 400 richest people in the United States, have a combined net worth of $1 trillion-greater than the gross domestic product of China.16 Between 1995 and 1998, the average annual income for a member of this elite group rose from $50 million to a staggering $110 million. The obscene wealth of a Bill Gates of Microsoft, a Phil Knight of Nike, and all of the other instant Internet billionaires, alongside the sizable residue of poverty that blights the contemporary United States, reminds us of the link between the distribution of income and intellectual property. Emblematic of the extent of this new distribution of property, in 1999 outside of those who have inherited their wealth, three of the four richest people in the world, according to a Forbes magazine survey, owed their wealth to Microsoft, one of the major holders of intellectual property rights, befitting the so-called New Economy in which “DOS Capital” has supplanted Das Kapital.

However, it can be argued that the inclusion of China into the architecture of the global economy (through bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). and investment by global corporations in China) will lessen the chances of conflict (through bodies declares that China’s rulers “want to do business, and their highest priorities, by far, are economic their adhesion to the World Trade Organization is the surest indication that the want to be integrated into a capitalist world economy 20 From this perspective, it could he argued that a China included into the space of “globalization” will present less danger than non-state actors, such as deterritorialized and flexible terrorist networks. Although the Realist could point out that such a line of argument is exactly what an intellectual such as Mearsheimer is trying to protect us from as the sense of fear that people feel after 9/I I—with its violent immediacy and visceral power—may lead politicians to focus on sources of insecurity that are really not that dangerous for the long term security of the state. A terrorist network could not have access to the type of weapons of mass destruction that China has access to states—by definition of their military capability—are still the main agents of destruction on the geopolitical scene. Of course the Realist may argue that China plays by the rules of the capitalist system because they are means to an end—but what happens when it becomes a peer competitor. From the Offensive Realist perspective, this is the underworld to the “optimistic” vision of liberal theorists who argue that enlargement of the spaces of economy and democracy will lead to order and progress in international affairs.

Fear of China is not unique to Mearsheimer’s work on Offensive Realism and it is a discourse of danger that circulates in many areas where the future of security and the global economy are debated, This fear of China in the contemporary political imaginary of Europe and the United States appears to stem from an awareness by the “developed” of the power of capitalism and technology to unleash huge changes in society (creating a condition of “everlasting uncertainty.” as Marx and Engels put it). It stems from the view that in Europe and the United States there are moral limits imposed on the market civilization of liberal democracy (although these moral limits may become flexible outside of the “core”). As Max Weber put it the “inner attitude of the adventurer that laughs at all ethical limitation is universal”2’ the fear of China emerges from the sense that a capitalist China competing in a global economy will unleash the power of the market without an sense of ethical limitation. In this sense, commentators from both Left and Right fear a territory where 1.3 billion individuals are willing to work for low pay as in a zone where “even thing is permitted” The Economist comments that China has an “inexhaustible supply of workers, willing to work long hours for pitifully low pay.” In November 2002 Wired, a magazine that celebrates—some would say fetishizes—the vision of an information age driven by free markets and a borderless economy, published an article on “The I lot zone” “An untamed technology boom is sweeping through China’s Pearl River Delta, where cheap labor, mass production, police thugs and get-rich-quick dreams rule. It’s a terrible, Horrible, lawless frontier. And it works.” The fear of China is combined with a perverse fascination—and maybe even admiration—for the ‘unrefined” market free from liberal concerns and maybe this is what scares Mearsheimer: a population that does not hold the “deep-seated” optimism and liberalism of the United States. This fear of “unrefined” capitalism is what lies at the core of these views of China, a fear that “unthinking hordes.” used only to totalitarian governance, will threaten the decadent tame zones of liberal democracy. A similar fear drove the imaginary of the Cold War, articulated through Holly wood fantasies of immoral scientists and unthinking robot armies or zombies attacking the free communities of 1950s America.

Sinophobia, or fear of China and things coming from China, has been a problem since Chinese immigrants started coming to the United States in the mid 19th century. European settlers saw the Chinese as competition for “their” jobs (in industries built by Chinese workers!) and organized themselves to indulge in brutal violence and massacres. This was the activity of many of the earliest unions in the United States. In cities and mining camps across the stolen West, settlers drove away Chinese immigrants (or massacred them) to steal their mining claims and expropriate their property. Eventually a bill was passed forbidding further Chinese immigration (backed by the Knights of Labor). In the 20th Century, the “yellow peril” myth was used to expropriate Japanese farmers from their lands in California and Hawaii, using the fact that the United States was at war with the Japanese Empire. Of course, the fact that many of these Japanese were second/third generation was ignored by land-hungry settlers. Chinese in the US were forced to wear placards and buttons stating that they were not Japanese to avoid violence and abuse from settlers. After WWII, the liberation of the Chinese mainland by the Chinese people led by their Communist Party resurrected the fear in the minds of settler Americans and Chinese people once again fell under harassment and suspicion as being Communists. Travel to China was forbidden and those who supported the Chinese Revolution and New China in any form were forced before Congressional committees, blacklisted from jobs, booted from academic positions, and generally tormented. William Hinton, author of Fanshen, The Great Reversal, and other good primary sources stemming from his years of work alongside the Chinese people as they made revolution and built socialism, had his papers seized upon his return to the United States. In essence, most of the modern day fear of China and Chinese people stems from the fact that they were a massive thorn in the side of Yankee, Japanese, and European imperialism, and served as a beacon of light for the world’s people. Fast forward to 2021. China is no longer a socialist country, it is a social imperialist superpower that suppresses the masses within the PRC while eagerly trapping countries in the Third World with debt and eating up the land of neighboring countries. Revisionists are cynically tying the inter-imperialist conflict between the United States and China to the upsurge in chauvinist attacks on Chinese people within the United States, most egregiously displayed in the massacre of 8 women, 6 of whom were Asian, on Tuesday in Atlanta. The murderer, Robert Long, expressed violent anti-Asian sentiment which culminated in the attack. The bourgeois media wasted no time talking about the killer “having a bad day” and talking about issues in his personal life. Bourgeois media purposefully hides the class and national implications and causes of acts, and seeks to break Europeans down to “troubled individuals” while tarring Asian, Black, Latinx and other people with a wide and dirty brush. The revisionists, who still promote the myth of “Socialism With Chinese Characteristics” and absurdly claim that all Chinese people are representatives and supporters of the revisionist CCP, claim that the root cause of these attacks is the inter-imperialist saber-rattling. The saber-rattling, ramped up under Trump with his racist provocations around the COVID-19 pandemic and continued by Biden with fresh sanctions, undoubtedly plays a role, but it is not the root cause of this upsurge in violence. It’s already been shown how anti-Chinese and anti-Asian violence in general has existed in the United States since the arrival of large numbers of immigrants from Asia in the 19th century. The revisionists use these attacks and xenophobia as a cudgel against Maoists claiming that we are somehow responsible for the xenophobic attacks by correctly critiquing China as a social-imperialist country (ignoring that the theory of social-imperialism was worked out first by Lenin and then applied by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party to criticize the USSR during the socialist period!) and have blood on our hands. This is absurd. The Maoist position on these attacks is that they are the continued expression of all-American xenophobia and hatred of non-white people. This is the same country that lynched New Afrikan people, committed acts of genocide against Indigenous people, and spread war all over the world to seize markets and land. It is essential that Communists go among the people not to drum up support for the social-imperialist PRC but to organize self-defense collectives to combat racist attacks and harassment. The Maoist prescription for xenophobic violence is to arm and train the people, not to engage in revisionist geopolitics. It is essential that we do not abandon our principles or fail to correctly sum up phenomena. We must combat sinophobia by exposing the sources of hatred of Chinese and Asian people. This can be done without being agents of PRC social imperialism. The revisionist CCP is not representative of the millions of Chinese people who are oppressed and exploited by billionaires that have leadership in the CCP. Furthermore, Lenin and Mao taught us that we Communists do not have to take sides in inter-imperialist spats. There is no risk of war danger between the United States and China, just as there was no war danger between the USSR and the US. The theory of “peaceful coexistence” is shared by revisionists nationally and internationally. Furthermore, imperialists, social and otherwise, have too much capital tied up in each other to engage in open wars. The US invests in China, and China invests in the US. The masses continue to be exploited, beaten, and abused all over the world. Revolution must continue to be on the agenda and actively struggled towards by all Communists.

However, it can be argued that the inclusion of China into the architecture of the global economy (through bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). and investment by global corporations in China) will lessen the chances of conflict (through bodies declares that China’s rulers “want to do business, and their highest priorities, by far, are economic their adhesion to the World Trade Organization is the surest indication that the want to be integrated into a capitalist world economy 20 From this perspective, it could he argued that a China included into the space of “globalization” will present less danger than non-state actors, such as deterritorialized and flexible terrorist networks. Although the Realist could point out that such a line of argument is exactly what an intellectual such as Mearsheimer is trying to protect us from as the sense of fear that people feel after 9/I I—with its violent immediacy and visceral power—may lead politicians to focus on sources of insecurity that are really not that dangerous for the long term security of the state. A terrorist network could not have access to the type of weapons of mass destruction that China has access to states—by definition of their military capability—are still the main agents of destruction on the geopolitical scene. Of course the Realist may argue that China plays by the rules of the capitalist system because they are means to an end—but what happens when it becomes a peer competitor. From the Offensive Realist perspective, this is the underworld to the “optimistic” vision of liberal theorists who argue that enlargement of the spaces of economy and democracy will lead to order and progress in international affairs.

Fear of China is not unique to Mearsheimer’s work on Offensive Realism and it is a discourse of danger that circulates in many areas where the future of security and the global economy are debated, This fear of China in the contemporary political imaginary of Europe and the United States appears to stem from an awareness by the “developed” of the power of capitalism and technology to unleash huge changes in society (creating a condition of “everlasting uncertainty.” as Marx and Engels put it). It stems from the view that in Europe and the United States there are moral limits imposed on the market civilization of liberal democracy (although these moral limits may become flexible outside of the “core”). As Max Weber put it the “inner attitude of the adventurer that laughs at all ethical limitation is universal”2’ the fear of China emerges from the sense that a capitalist China competing in a global economy will unleash the power of the market without an sense of ethical limitation. In this sense, commentators from both Left and Right fear a territory where 1.3 billion individuals are willing to work for low pay as in a zone where “even thing is permitted” The Economist comments that China has an “inexhaustible supply of workers, willing to work long hours for pitifully low pay.” In November 2002 Wired, a magazine that celebrates—some would say fetishizes—the vision of an information age driven by free markets and a borderless economy, published an article on “The I lot zone” “An untamed technology boom is sweeping through China’s Pearl River Delta, where cheap labor, mass production, police thugs and get-rich-quick dreams rule. It’s a terrible, Horrible, lawless frontier. And it works.” The fear of China is combined with a perverse fascination—and maybe even admiration—for the ‘unrefined” market free from liberal concerns and maybe this is what scares Mearsheimer: a population that does not hold the “deep-seated” optimism and liberalism of the United States. This fear of “unrefined” capitalism is what lies at the core of these views of China, a fear that “unthinking hordes.” used only to totalitarian governance, will threaten the decadent tame zones of liberal democracy. A similar fear drove the imaginary of the Cold War, articulated through Holly wood fantasies of immoral scientists and unthinking robot armies or zombies attacking the free communities of 1950s America.

Beyond explicit confrontations, since intellectual monopolies organize and plan production and innovation networks taking place in different countries, they generate an overlap of political realms with sometimes contradictory rules and norms. Who oversees production and innovation inside the networks organized by intellectual monopolies? The latter or the different states where intellectual monopolies’ production or innovation networks are based? To whom subordinate firms and other organizations are accountable for their actions? Their state or the intellectual monopoly coordinating the network? The simple answer is both. The complicated part is to identify what happens when they are in contradiction, and what are the consequences of this complex set of power structures for workers and subordinated organizations.

Intellectual monopolies have replaced state functions as policymakers. An extreme example recently disclosed is Eric Schmidt, Alphabet’s former executive chairman, advising the US federal government while still managing Alphabet. He was the chair of the US Defense Innovation Board, which recommended the use of artificial intelligence to the US Department of Defense. He also chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence which advises the US Congress on analogous topics (Klein, 2020).

Neoliberal governance, as we argued earlier together with Foucault and Brown, is a governing rationality that cannot be understood merely in terms of its general economic policies: the privatization of public services and industries, the deregulation of markets and firms, the destruction of labor unions, and so forth. Neoliberalism must be grasped also in terms of the production of subjectivity, that is, the creation at all levels of society of individual entrepreneurial subjects, homines economici, who, in turn, continually reproduce the neoliberal world. This recognition could easily lead to despair: how can we resist neoliberalism, let alone create alternatives to it, if our own subjectivity is produced by it and permeated by its rationality? There seems to be nowhere outside neoliberalism we can stand.

Power, however—and neoliberal power is no exception—is not organic or unitary but is always defined by relationship and antagonism. Foucault himself explains that power is a structure of “actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions.”26 Resistance is always present in power from the beginning, as is the potential for rupture. The processes of subjection, then, and the production of subjectivities that are functional to power are themselves both precarious and shot through with resistances and alternative potentials. Subjectivity, in other words, is not a given but a terrain of struggle.

Postmodern cultural studies also rewrites the category of materiality to refer to local practices and, ultimately, the body. For example, postmodern cultural studies theorist John Fiske, while defining the material in terms of economic constraints, at the same time argues for an understanding of materiality as the absence of any possibility for abstraction, of any distancing from the products of culture. “­Culture,” he says, “is inescapably material: distantiation is an unattainable luxury. The culture of everyday life is concrete, contextualized, and lived, just as deprivation is concrete, contextualized and lived” (1992, 155). Since he identifies the material with the lived experience of everyday life in the face of oppression and with the construction of an individualized environment that makes survival and resistance possible, ­he goes on to locate materiality in the body: “The body and its specific behavior is where the power system stops being abstract and becomes material” (162). For this reason, he considers it important to develop a “bottom-up” (165) notion of subjectivity, as op­posed to those theories in which contradictions in subjectivity “are traced back to the complex elaborations of late capitalist societies” (161). ­This, I argue, excludes the possibility of understanding materiality in terms of the systemic connections between specific practices. It reduces subjectivity to the local contexts in which individualized modes of life are constructed, and it refuses any theory that does not involve “the development of the ability to experience as far as possible from the inside other people’s ways of living” (159). In this case, of course, it becomes impossible to theorize the world market or capitalist class domination, since these would be considered abstract categories that cannot be inside anyone’s way of living.­

Globalization of the world-economy has altered the ways in which bio-power is produced and implemented. Thus, also the rationalization of bodies has taken different forms and especially different scope in the global-age than during the development of modern capitalism. The bio-power of globalized world-economy overrides the nation-state as the primary determinant of the government of individualization and produces a new totalizing and individualizing global and globalized governmentality, which subjectifies individuals directly. What ties together the governmentality of modern capitalism and the governmentality of the globalized world economy is the underlying regime of truth, grounded in liberalist notions of the individual. The governmentality of the global capitalism ties the individual by the rationalization of the subject according to labor, capacities and innovation for the mass-production and mass-consumption processes. The liberalist ideology that is the grounds of neo-liberalist global governance of corporate capitalism is driven and institutionalized by a new transnational class, multilateral institutions and state managers (Axtman 1998, Rupert 1997). These institutions set global rules influencing national policy-making and aiming to construct a free-trade based world market system, which for some may seem, more a system of neo-constitutionalism (Gill 1995) or a system of bureaucratization that erodes national sovereignty in the face of corporate elites, and for the benefit of transnational capital (for discussion see; Rupert 1997).

As class contradictions have sharpened with the intensification of the crisis of profitability in global capitalism, cultural theory in the North Atlantic retreats further and further into spiritual explanations and resolutions of material contradictions. Rather than confronting the relationship of the poverty of workers around the world, the concentration of wealth into fewer hands, increases in unemployment and economic insecurity, the commodification of all aspects of life subordinating them to production for profit, and the deepening alienation of workers to class relations founded on exploitation in production, contemporary cultural theory has abandoned examining the social, the historical, and the material basis of these questions in production relations. Instead, it is turning to immaterial, affective, and spiritual explanations and resolutions of material contradictions and ideologically translating capitalism and exploitation into ontological conditions of life as such.

The Biopolitical Turn, or, Disappearing Class from Life under Capitalism

PhD from MIT (Paul Staniland is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago, “Misreading the “Liberal Order”: Why We Need New Thinking in American Foreign Policy,” July 29,

Pushing back against Trump’s foreign policy is an important goal. But moving forward requires a more serious analysis than claiming that the “liberal international order” was the centerpiece of past U.S. foreign-policy successes, and thus should be again. Both claims are flawed. We need to understand the limits of the liberal international order, where it previously failed to deliver benefits, and why it offers little guidance for many contemporary questions. First, advocates of the order tend to skim past the policies pursued under the liberal order that have not worked. These mistakes need to be directly confronted to do better in the future. Proponents of the order, however, often present a narrow and highly selective reading of history that ignores much of the coercion, violence, and instability that accompanied post-war history. Problematic outcomes are treated as either aberrant exceptions or as not truly characterizing the order. One recent defense of the liberal order by prominent liberal institutionalists Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, for instance, does not mention Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, or Libya. Professors Stephen Chaudoin, Helen Milner, and Dustin Tingley herald the order’s “support for freedom, democracy, human rights, a free press.” Kori Schake writes that Western democracies’ wars are “about enlarging the perimeter of security and prosperity, expanding and consolidating the liberal order.” Historian Hal Brands argues that the order has advocated “political liberalism in the form of representative government and human rights; and other liberal concepts, such as nonaggression, self-determination, and the peaceful settlement of disputes.” Other analysts have persuasively argued that these accounts create an “imagined” picture of post-World War II history. Patrick Porter outlines in detail how coercive, violent, and hypocritical U.S. foreign policy has often been. To the extent an international liberal order ever actually existed beyond a small cluster of countries, writes Nick Danforth, it was recent and short-lived. Thomas Meaney and Stephen Wertheim further argue that “critics exaggerate Mr. Trump’s abnormality,” situating him within a long history of the pursuit of American self-interest. Graham Allison—no bomb-throwing radical—has recently written that the order was a “myth” and that credit for the lack of great power war should instead go to nuclear deterrence. Coercion and disregard for both allies and political liberalism have been entirely compatible with the “liberal” order. The last two decades have been a bumpy ride for U.S. foreign policy. Since 9/11, we have seen the disintegration of Syria, Yemen, and Libya, a war without end in Afghanistan, the collapse of the Arab Spring, the rise and resurgence of the Islamic State, and the distinctly mixed success of strategies aimed at managing China’s rise. At home, the growth of a national-security state has placed remarkable power in the hands of Donald Trump. Simply returning to the old order is no guarantee of good results. Grappling openly with failure and self-inflicted wounds—while also acknowledging clear benefits of the order—is essential for moving beyond self-congratulatory platitudes. Second, the liberal order in its idealized form had very limited reach into what are now pivotal areas of U.S. security policy: Asia, the Middle East, and the “developing world” more broadly. The core of the liberal order remains transatlantic, but Asia is now growing dramatically in wealth and military power. What is the record of the order in the region? There was certainly some democracy promotion when authoritarian regimes began to totter, but there was also deep, sustained cooperation with dictators like Suharto and Ferdinand Marcos; while there are some regional institutions (such as ASEAN), they are comparatively weak; while there are some rules, they have been deeply contested. Close U.S. allies like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea (the latter two experiencing long bouts of U.S.-allied autocracy) were not integrated into a broad alliance pact like NATO. India and Pakistan were never part of the core order, and China was only very partially integrated (primarily into the economic pillar of the order, and through ad hoc security cooperation from the 1970s). Southeast Asia has been a site of warfare and authoritarianism for much of its post-1945 history. The United States has long considered the Middle East vital to its security, but the extent to which the United States should invest its own blood and treasure in protecting the area was always up for debate. It was only in the 1970s that the United States decided it was prepared to use force to defend the region; “dual containment” in the 1990s was always controversial, while the invasion of Iraq and its chaotic aftermath revealed deep fissures over how much presence was enough. Meanwhile, liberalism, democracy, human rights, and international institutions have not made much of a mark in the region. Jake Sullivan, in a rather odd defense of the order, suggests that “Middle Eastern instability has been a feature, not a bug, of the system.” This is not reassuring about the order’s ability to structure politics in the area. The same can be said about the order’s history in Africa, with deep Western involvement in civil wars, support for authoritarian regimes, and often-counterproductive demands for economic liberalization contributing to ongoing instability. The legacy of the “liberal order” is both far more complex and shallower outside of the north Atlantic core than within it. Invocations of the order are seen with greater cynicism and suspicion in these areas than in Washington or Berlin. Yet they are precisely the regions that are increasingly the focus of U.S. security policy. Finally, and as the preceding already suggests, the idea of “liberal order” is itself frequently too vague a concept, and was too incomplete a phenomenon, to offer guidance on a number of key contemporary questions. Allison goes so far as to call it “conceptual Jell-o.” The extremely abstract principles that experts use to define the order are confronted with a reality of extreme historical variation. This amorphousness undermines its usefulness as an actual guide to future foreign policy. U.S. alliances in Western Europe since World War II looked dramatically different than those in East Asia. Both have achieved their basic goals, so which should be the model for the future? The United States often applied pressure to coerce its allies into adopting economic and security policies conducive to U.S. interests—going so far as to threaten abandonment of close European allies—even as it simultaneously built key elements of the liberal order. The core of the liberal order was a more tenuous and contested political space than we often remember. This inconsistency applies to involvement in the domestic politics of other states. The United States has regularly embraced authoritarian leaders (and distanced itself from democratic regimes), while at other times it has helped to push these leaders out in the face of domestic mobilization. Advocates of the order tend to stress the latter and dismiss the former as aberrant, but both strategies contributed to the ultimate victory of the liberal order over the Soviet bloc. The order’s history offers support for aggressively promoting democracy, accepting democratization when it emerges, and strongly supporting friendly dictators. This makes it unhelpful for grappling with the question of whether and how to promote democracy. The same is true of military interventions and covert operations abroad. U.S. leaders invested heavily in Cold War proxy wars and the overthrow of foreign regimes, while at other times and places they avoided such interventions. This history carries important implications for addressing today’s policy challenges. Simply appealing to the order does not, for instance, tell us much about how to deal with a rising China: Since the liberal order included highly institutionalized alliances, loose “hub-and-spoke” arrangements, and coalitions of the willing, and was characterized by both preventive wars and containment, it is extremely unclear what the order suggests for America’s China strategy. While “rules-based” order is a term in vogue, it doesn’t tell us what the rules should actually be, or how they should be decided. Nor does appealing to the liberal order help us understand whether the United States needs to be deeply involved or largely absent from the Middle East, or somewhere in between. Under the order, democracy promotion and assertive liberal intervention sometimes occurred, but so too did restraint and an acceptance of autocracy. There are no answers in the liberal international order for navigating the enormously difficult terrain of the contemporary Middle East.

Charles Glaser, “A Flawed Framework: Why the Liberal International Order Concept Is Misguided,” International Security, Vol 43, Spring 2019, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00343

Proponents of the LIO have made ambitious claims about its positive impact on U.S. security, maintaining that it was responsible for the Cold War peace, U.S. success in winning the Cold War, the specialization of capabilities within U.S. alliances,40 and the lack of balancing against predominant U.S. power following the Cold War. In addition, they ascribe the peace and cooperation that characterized the first two decades of the post–Cold War era largely to the LIO.

Glaser 19 – professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the Department of Political Science at George Washington University

Charles Glaser, “A Flawed Framework: Why the Liberal International Order Concept Is Misguided,” International Security, Vol 43, Spring 2019, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00343

Among the debates that have swept the U.S. foreign policy community since the beginning of the Trump administration, alarm about the fate of the liberal international rules-based order has emerged as one of the few fixed points. From the international relations scholar G. John Ikenberry's claim that "for seven decades the world has been dominated by a western liberal order" to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's call in the final days of the Obama administration to "act urgently to defend the liberal international order," this banner waves atop most discussions of the United States' role in the world. About this order, the reigning consensus makes three core claims. First, that the liberal order has been the principal cause of the so-called long peace among great powers for the past seven decades. Second, that constructing this order has been the main driver of U.S. engagement in the world over that period. And third, that U.S. President Donald Trump is the primary threat to the liberal order-and thus to world peace. The political scientist Joseph Nye, for example, has written, "The demonstrable success of the order in helping secure and stabilize the world over the past seven decades has led to a strong consensus that defending, deepening, and extending this system has been and continues to be the central task of U.S. foreign policy." Nye has gone so far as to assert: "I am not worried by the rise of China. I am more worried by the rise of Trump." Although all these propositions contain some truth, each is more wrong than right. The "long peace" was the not the result of a liberal order but the byproduct of the dangerous balance of power between the Soviet Union and the United States during the four and a half decades of the Cold War and then of a brief period of U.S. dominance. U.S. engagement in the world has been driven not by the desire to advance liberalism abroad or to build an international order but by the need to do what was necessary to preserve liberal democracy at home. And although Trump is undermining key elements of the current order, he is far from the biggest threat to global stability. These misconceptions about the liberal order's causes and consequences lead its advocates to call for the United States to strengthen the order by clinging to pillars from the past and rolling back authoritarianism around the globe. Yet rather than seek to return to an imagined past in which the United States molded the world in its image, Washington should limit its efforts to ensuring sufficient order abroad to allow it to concentrate on reconstructing a viable liberal democracy at home. CONCEPTUAL JELL-O The ambiguity of each of the terms in the phrase "liberal international rules-based order" creates a slipperiness that allows the concept to be applied to almost any situation. When, in 2017, members of the World Economic Forum in Davos crowned Chinese President Xi Jinping the leader of the liberal economic order-even though he heads the most protectionist, mercantilist, and predatory major economy in the world-they revealed that, at least in this context, the word "liberal" has come unhinged.

But the existing order is more resilient than this assessment suggests. There is no doubt that Trump represents a meaningful threat to the health of both American democracy and the international system. And there is a  that he could drag the country into a constitutional crisis, or the world into a crippling trade war or even an all-out nuclear war. Yet despite these risks, rumors of the international order’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. The system is built to last through significant shifts in global politics and economics and strong enough to survive a term of President Trump. 

This more optimistic view is offered not as comfort but as a call to action. The present moment demands resolve and affirmative thinking from the foreign policy community about how to sustain and reinforce the international order, not just lamentations about Trump’s destructiveness or resignation about the order’s fate. No one knows for certain how things will turn out. But fatalism will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Janan Ganesh, February 7 2023, “A Republican-led US would not shrink from the world,” Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/content/adc59ddd-2793-476b-b5dc-3ae8eac21d90

With Lord Halifax rather than Winston Churchill in charge, does Britain fight on in 1940? Had Richard Nixon not “opened” it, would China be a superpower? What if Pilate had spared Jesus? And so on. There is a repertoire of historical counterfactuals and it was getting stale until a year ago. Then a new question was added to the parlour game. What if Russia had attacked Ukraine while Donald Trump was US president? Imagine: the America Firster looks away, a weapons-starved Kyiv falls, autocrats the world over strike other targets as the west stands exposed as a paper tiger. This low view of US Republicans is a good thing. It spurs countries to make provisions for their own security in case Trump, or someone in his image, runs America again. Germany and Japan are cases in point. The arsenal of democracy is set to grow. It is just that, well, a useful misapprehension is still a misapprehension. In foreign affairs, the Republicans are ever more chauvinist. That is not the same thing as isolationist. It is very often the opposite. During his one term in office, Trump fired missiles at Syria as punishment for using chemical weapons, assassinated an Iranian general on the soil of a third country and began (or recognised) a struggle with China for mastery of the century. He also increased defence spending. He doesn’t believe in the west, no. But because its enemies tend also to be America’s, and nothing is dearer to him than American amour propre, he often ends up acting as a Harry Truman-ish “hard” liberal might. In other words, jingoism has its uses. Yes, it clashes with the give-and-take of international life: Republicans increasingly dislike trade and multilateral bodies. But it is an asset when things turn raw. A conventional US president would support an allied nation under attack because it is the right thing to do. A populist one might support it because anything else looks weak. It is less about principle than face, but leads to the same forward posture. Populism is as complex and self-contradicting as the next political creed. To an almost Freudian extent, it admires strongmen. Had Russia taken Kyiv at speed, a certain kind of rudderless young man in the west would still be “stanning” Vladimir Putin online as a grandmaster. At the same time, no one is likelier or better-equipped to butt heads with rough nationalists than other rough nationalists. Trump would both flatter North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and threaten to “totally destroy” him, remember. He had fewer moral qualms with Bashar al-Assad than Barack Obama did, but only one of those US leaders enforced the red line on chemical weapons against the Syrian despot. The other merely drew it. In the populist id, strongman-worship vies with a hatred of being seen to give any quarter to anyone, ever. Even in theory, then, there isn’t an easy equation between populism and appeasement. True, polls suggest a decline of support among conservative Americans for Ukraine. Republicans in Congress have become ever more difficult about aid. Nations from Europe to east Asia are right to worry about a slackening of American commitment to allies in future. But that could happen under anyone. The US was “leading from behind” before Trump. There is a butter-over-guns caucus on the left. A Democrat (Obama) and an establishment Republican (George W Bush) let a Russian attack on a neighbour happen on their watch without adequate response. One of the most direct calls for a “settlement” with Russia over the past year came from the congressional left. I used to think that US-watchers invoked no spectre more often, more baselessly, than “isolationism”. It dignifies a movement with little purchase on public life since Pearl Harbor. There will always be a Pat Buchanan or Gore Vidal (note the right-to-left spread) but nothing is achieved by talking them up as though America might revert to Neutrality Acts and naval retrenchment. The stunning thing about US politics is how few votes for isolation there are in perhaps the only major country that could safely practise it. Now, I think there is something to be said for talking up the risk of a withdrawn US. That fear is driving up the military ambitions of Europe. It is ending the “neutrality” of some democracies. And framing isolation as a Trumpist thing in particular rallies the global left behind a cause — defence spending — that it might otherwise oppose. Keep the trope going, then. Just don’t believe it.