Empirically denied – e.g. Soviet Union, China, Iraq, North Korea, trade decline and ON and ON

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.

The LIO can take little or no credit for these outcomes, however, because it is a partial order and because the LIO concept is primarily inward looking. By partial, I mean that the order does not include all of the major powers;41 by in- ward looking, I mean that the LIO concept primarily addresses interactions between states that are members of the order, not interactions between its members and states that lay outside the LIO. In other words, links between the LIO concept and the behavior of potential U.S. adversaries are largely missing.

My argument does not dispute that individual elements of the LIO significantly influence interactions between the United States (and its allies) and nonmember states. There are well-established theories that explain these inter- actions. Given its inward focus, however, the LIO concept fails to identify additional interactions, outcomes, or benefits.

Consider, first, the Cold War. The Soviet Union and its allies were not members of the LIO. They were not democracies, so democratic peace arguments do not apply. Nor were they members of the most important and most consequential LIO institutions, including NATO. Thus, the institutional binding argument says little about how institutional arrangements influenced political relations between the United States and Soviet Union. Nor does the hierarchy argument apply globally, because the Cold War was bipolar. To the extent that the United States enjoyed power advantages within this bipolarity, it could not use them to gain legitimate authority through a consensual bargain with the Soviet Union. Finally, the Soviet Union was largely excluded from the West’s open markets and its financial system; thus, economic interdependence arguments do not apply. In short, the LIO concept does not address interactions between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The post–Cold War era is less clear cut. Nevertheless, the LIO concept continues to suffer many of the problems associated with its inward focus. China is not a democracy, and it is not a member of the United States’ security alliances in Asia; indeed, China is now the target of these alliances. The binding and hierarchy arguments, therefore, do not apply to China. China was, how- ever, increasingly integrated into the international economy, including the WTO, during this period; economic interdependence between the United States and China grew dramatically, as did China’s wealth. Thus, the economic interdependence and convergence arguments do apply. The LIO concept says little about the expected results when only some of its mechanisms apply. In any event, the results predicted by the LIO’s interdependence and convergence mechanisms have been disappointing: growing international trade has been accompanied by escalating tensions between the United States and China, not by reduced tensions; and China’s dramatic economic success has been accompanied recently by increasingly centralized authoritarian rule, not democracy and liberalization more generally. China’s failure to move toward democracy has been possibly the greatest disappointment for proponents of the LIO.