Heg is good and sustainable – working international structures, U.S. security commitments, and democratic commonality

[Friedman Senior Fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy, Foreign Policy Brookings Program, written several books regarding the international order and U.S. hegemony, contributing columnist to the Washington Post, 9-18-2018, “The Jungle Grows Back: American and Our Imperiled World,” accessed 3-2-2020]

Despite everything that has happened, if we reject the counsels of the new “realism” and resume our support for the liberal world order, it is still within our capacity to defend it and put off its collapse, perhaps for some time. Today the order remains intact, despite the hostility of the present administration and the weakness of the last. The international structures supporting it are durable. This is partly because they rest on geographical realities and a distribution of power that still favor the liberal order and still pose obstacles to those who would disrupt it. It is also because liberal values, though under assault, remain a force that binds the democratic nations of the world together. Authoritarianism also has its appeal and will always compete with liberalism, but the authoritarian governments do not feel the same sense of commonality as the monarchies and aristocracies of the early nineteenth century. The Chinese and Russians are not adversaries, but they are not allies either. They share little except their antipathy to liberalism. The democratic nations, however, are bound together by more than common adversaries, as the post–Cold War era has proved. America’s alliances in Europe and Asia have so far held, therefore, despite the weakening of America’s commitment under two administrations. There is still a liberal world order to be salvaged, if the American people decide it is worth salvaging.

They will also have to decide that they are prepared to pay the costs, and those costs have not changed. It took great and consistent exertions of American power and influence to create and sustain this world order. It will take no less to continue upholding it into the future. Americans over the past two decades have become convinced that the United States is doing too much when actually it has been doing too little.

Much of what needs to be done to shore up the order requires only diplomatic and economic measures. The United States needs to return to the deep engagement with Europe that characterized the relationship from the postwar years to the early post–Cold War years. Americans must understand that a healthy liberal Europe is the anchor of the order from which they benefit. Therefore such matters as the negotiation of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, the Eurozone crisis, the cyber threats from Russia, and European energy supplies must be addressed not just as European problems but as transatlantic problems that affect the United States, too. The United States also needs to work with European governments to address the democratic backsliding in Europe. Nations that entered the EU and NATO after the Cold War had to meet high standards of democratic governance in order to gain membership. If some have ceased to meet those standards, they need to be suspended from membership or denied some of the benefits of membership. Hungary and Turkey cannot expect to enjoy the benefits of NATO, and, in Hungary’s case, EU membership, so long as they celebrate their “illiberalism” and reject the basic premises of the liberal world order. Finally, the United States needs to return to the liberal compact when it comes to trade and international institutions. It was a serious blow to the liberal order when the United States walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership—and a great boon to China. The order will suffer further if American trade policies seek “wins” over close allies like Canada and Germany. Americans need to understand that the free trade regime undergirds the order from which they benefit as much or more than anyone. It is not a “win” if that regime collapses into the protectionism that characterized the decades before World War II. Then there is the question of maintaining America’s military predominance in the international system. For all the talk of “soft” power and “smart” power, it is ultimately the American security guarantee, the ability to deploy hard power to deter and defeat potential aggressors, that provides the essential foundation without which the liberal world order could never survive. Members of Congress from both parties have underfunded the military since the beginning of the post–Cold War era, but especially over the last decade. Defense secretaries from both parties have raised alarms about the increasing inability of the armed forces to perform their missions of deterrence around the world. And the dangers of war have only grown in recent years, not diminished. Americans need to remember that deterring a war is much less expensive than fighting one.