17-3-26
Something is fracturing in the liberal international order.
But the primary architects of this fracture are not China or Russia, they are
the liberal democracies themselves. The biopolitics and materialist foundations
that long undergirded Western liberalism, and which once justified colonial
expansion under the banner of "civilization," are now reverberating
inward. Trump's confrontations with NATO allies, his transactional approach to
Europe, and the bizarre episode of pursuing Greenland all signal something
deeper than diplomatic awkwardness. They reveal a liberal hegemon turning the
logic of domination onto its own alliance structure.
Yet this is not a simple story of American decline or
Western collapse. It is a more complex unraveling, one where the internal
contradictions of liberal governance, the institutional architecture built
after 1945, and the unresolved legacies of colonialism all converge.
The Hegemon Turns
Inward
The United States has always wielded power asymmetrically
within the Western alliance. What has shifted is the framing. Earlier
iterations of American leadership, however self-interested, maintained the
fiction of shared values and mutual benefit. The current moment dispenses with
the fiction. When a sitting American president muses about purchasing Greenland
or withholds military aid to pressure allies, the implicit message is clear:
the post-war bargain, American protection in exchange European esteem, now
looks less like partnership and more like suzerainty.
This reflects what Foucault termed biopolitics, though
perhaps in a diluted sense. American power today operates less through direct
population management than through the leveraging of dependency, security
guarantees, intelligence sharing, financial infrastructure, to compel
compliance. Europe's resistance to US wishes on China policy, energy sanctions,
and Gaza demonstrate that this strategy has limits. But the very need for such
resistance reveals how deeply the liberal house is divided.
Institutional
Decay and the Multipolar Trap
The impotence of liberal institutions is now visible even to
their defenders. The UN Security Council's paralysis on Gaza, where the United
States repeatedly shields Israel from accountability while Russia and China
exploit the gridlock for their own narratives, has shattered any pretense of
universalist governance. The proposed Hormuz maritime coalition, cobbled
together outside existing frameworks, suggests that even the architects of the
liberal order no longer trust its institutions to function.
This institutional decay benefits China and Russia
asymmetrically. Not because they are stronger, but because their narratives
require less justification. When Western-led institutions fail to deliver peace
or justice, the Chinese model of state-capitalist authoritarianism and the
Russian model of civilizational sovereignty gain credibility by default. They
need not prove their superiority, only the hypocrisy of the alternative.
The Colonial
Return
The West's post-1700 project of universalizing Enlightenment
values was never purely benevolent. It carried within it a civilizing mission
that justified extraction, domination, and racial hierarchy under the guise of
universal progress. That same logic, when applied today to non-Western powers,
meets resistance not primarily from those powers' strength but from their
memory. The Iranian case is instructive: forty-five years of sanctions,
isolation, and pressure have not produced collapse or compliance. Instead, they
have resisted Western domination. This resilience resonates far beyond Iran's
borders.
The "return" here is not cyclical but structural.
The tools developed to manage colonial peripheries, debt, sanctions, military
coercion, narrative control, are now less effective as the peripheries develop
alternative relationships and institutions. The liberal West's epistemological
frameworks, which long claimed universality, now appear provincial when viewed
from Beijing, Tehran, or Moscow.
What Is Actually
Unraveling?
To speak of "liberalism" as a single entity
obscures more than it reveals. What is fracturing is a specific historical
formation: the American-led, post-1945 order of liberal internationalism,
embedded in institutions like NATO, the UN system, and the Bretton Woods
framework. This order always contained tensions, between sovereignty and
intervention, between markets and social welfare, between universal rights and
great-power prerogatives. Those tensions are now acute.
European liberalism differs from American liberalism. Social
democracy differs from neoliberalism. The secularism of French differs from the
pluralist accommodation of Canadian multiculturalism. These variations matter
because they shape how different liberal societies respond to the current
crisis. Germany's cautious hedging between the US and China is not the same as
Poland's enthusiastic Atlanticism. France's military autonomy project differs
from Britain's special relationship. The liberal house is divided not only
between the US and Europe but within Europe itself.
Material Foundations
Ideas alone do not explain this unraveling. Material factors
matter: American deindustrialization and inequality have eroded the domestic
consensus for global leadership. China's economic rise has created alternative
poles of accumulation and influence. The energy transition advantages
resource-holders differently than the carbon economy did. Demographic decline
in Europe and Japan contrasts with youth bulges in the Global South. These
material shifts interact with ideational changes in complex ways, neither
reducible to the other.
Beyond Decline
Narratives
The "dawn of a new world order" is not inevitable.
Orders do not simply collapse and replace one another; they hybridize, persist
in mutated form, and coexist with alternatives. The liberal international order
may become one order among many rather than the order. What Amitav Acharya
calls a "multiplex world", multiple powers, multiple ideas, multiple
institutional frameworks operating simultaneously, better captures the likely
future than either American decline or Chinese ascendancy narratives.
In such a world, power remains responsibility, but
responsibility is now contested. Who defines it? Toward whom is it owed? By
what metrics is it measured? The West's historical claim to define these terms
universally is no longer accepted. Whether that claim's erosion leads to
greater pluralism or greater chaos depends on choices yet unmade.
What’s Next
The Iranian example will multiply. Not because every
sanctioned state will replicate Iran's resilience, but because the mystique of
Western institutional power has been punctured. Countries will increasingly
navigate between poles, extract concessions from multiple patrons, and resist
full alignment with any bloc. This strategic autonomy, once a European
aspiration, is becoming a global default.
The liberal order's internal crisis does not guarantee
anything about what follows. It only guarantees that the transition will be
contested, unpredictable, and shaped by forces both within and beyond the West.
The coming years are interesting not because we know their destination but
because we do not.