US imposed liberal order guarantees political instability – resentment and backlash leads to armed conflict

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.