Their alternative is insufficient to replace the liberal hegemonic order. Reorganizing the structure of global institutions risks great power conflict and international disorder

This assessment of realist foreign policy proposals suggests that additional policy measures are required for developing a stable international order, to avoid proxy wars where possible and to contain and resolve them when they do emerge, in addition to further global challenges. Realists are not opposed to the use of diplomacy to avoid and manage conflict. To the contrary, they encourage it, but in encouraging the use of diplomacy it is crucial to recognize that diplomacy also requires the support of international institutions and established diplomatic networks. Diplomatic breakthroughs are difficult to achieve, requiring years of skillful and patient negotiations. Diplomacy, moreover, is an inconstant and limited tool without the support of broader international institutions that provide mechanisms of delay, ongoing networks of collaborative great power pressure on belligerent parties, and collaboratively developed processes and agreed terms of dispute resolution, negotiation, and mediation.

Realist critics of liberal hegemony often suggest policy-fuzzy gestures toward diplomacy and accommodation. Porter for instance argues that the United States should abandon liberal hegemony in favor of détente-style collaboration with illiberal powers in the making of global order (Porter 2020, 170–99). The key strategic proposal Porter advances is to

attempt a settlement with Russia with significant mutual concessions, including sacrificing the interests of non-NATO countries on its eastern flank, in order to ease the growing sense of mutual threat. To facilitate negotiations, the USA should revive government-to-government dialogue to reach a new bargain. (Porter 2020, 187)

This is a strategy to ease pressure on Russia, in the hopes of encouraging tensions between Russia and China, which Porter proposes to combine with a reduction of forces in the Middle East, and a containment strategy against China in Asia, by cultivating regional strategic partners. This proposal in the abstract sounds promising and genuinely contains helpful strategic thought, but does not propose sufficient measures to produce a lasting and stable order, and crucially requires the willingness to collaborate from Russia, which Porter admits is not guaranteed to be forthcoming (Porter 2020, 188). There is surely more needed for the construction of a stable and lasting order between the United States and China than a containment balancing strategy, even if it were successful in dividing Russia from China. Where the first proxy war between the United States and China would emerge can only be speculated. China, like the United States, has the capacity to wage indirect warfare, incentives to avoid direct conflict, and experience from the Cold War.

This as such poses a second limitation of realist policy alternatives; they are insufficiently ambitious in developing new and revised ordering of international institutions and take for granted the role of deeper primary institutions in producing international order (Mearsheimer 1994–1995).2 With limited confidence in the use of international institutions, realists struggle to provide a substantive and sufficient strategy for producing international order. Realists do acknowledge the importance of major institutions such as the United Nations or World Trade Organization for providing general “rules of the road” that clarify expectations among states (Mearsheimer 2018, 131; Walt 2018, 71). Yet, realists offer no suggestions for reforming these institutions for current challenges, nor do they see much promise in developing new institutions, and ultimately claim international institutions are ineffective because they have “no coercive leverage over states” in a context where states in anarchy find themselves in security competition precipitating conflict (Mearsheimer 2018, 131). As Mearsheimer states, “The nub of the dispute between liberals and realists regarding both institutions and economic interdependence has to do with whether they promote world peace. Liberals believe they ameliorate conflict; realists do not” (Mearsheimer 2018, 143). Walt provides a clear explanation of the realist lack of confidence in institutions where he states,

As multilateral organizations such as NATO, the World Bank, or the World Trade Organization have shown repeatedly, international institutions can facilitate cooperation when states have clear and obvious incentives to work together, but they cannot stop powerful states from acting as they wish and thus cannot remove the danger of conflict and war. International institutions are simply a tool that states use to advance their interests, and they inevitably reflect the interests of the most powerful states. (Walt 2018, 71)

Because institutions lack an ability to coerce great powers, realists claim, they have little to no impact on conflict between great powers that arises as a result of security competition.

Because of this lack of realist confidence in institutions, Walt and leading economist Dani Rodrick have instead advanced a global order proposal for constructing a collection of select global “meta-norms” as conflict avoidance and resolution mechanisms at a global level (Rodrik and Walt 2021). This proposal is important and in the right direction, as a needed element of building shared global order, but it is also a thin set of meta-norms, highly modest and limited in their order-making capacities and ambitions. The proposal does not include integrative institutions to formalize and embed meta-norms, nor does it provide inclusive principles to legitimate those meta-norms beyond the imperative to avoid direct great power conflict. Walt and Rodrick, moreover, suggest that their international order proposal exists within an emerging “bounded order” marked by proxy wars, and concede their meta-norms do little to help mitigate or resolve proxy wars, focusing more on avoiding direct great power conflict (Rodrik and Walt 2021, 20).

In modern international history, the international system has developed new institutions through a trial and error process—surely encountering new and unanticipated forms of disorder along the way as well as old ones—but nonetheless in a learning process of gradually broadened and deepened institutions that today realists themselves acknowledge as important. The decline of the liberal hegemonic order project invites new ideas for adapting international organizations and ordering practices. Under closer scrutiny, realist critics of liberal hegemony offer problematic international order proposals, while they nonetheless identify major problems in the liberal hegemonic order project. From closer examination and consideration, that is, these limitations of realist policy alternatives question their ability to contribute to international order in the twenty-first century and suggest, quite the opposite, that if pursued they would instead become new sources of international disorder, while nevertheless avoiding some of the problems associated with liberal internationalism.