Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order — John J. Mearsheimer

Abstract

The liberal international order, erected after the Cold War, was crumbling by 2019. It was flawed from the start and thus destined to fail. The spread of liberal democracy around the globe—essential for building that order—faced strong resistance because of nationalism, which emphasizes self-determination. Some targeted states also resisted U.S. efforts to promote liberal democracy for security-related reasons. Additionally, problems arose because a liberal order calls for states to delegate substantial decisionmaking authority to international institutions and to allow refugees and immigrants to move easily across borders. Modern nation-states privilege sovereignty and national identity, however, which guarantees trouble when institutions become powerful and borders porous. Furthermore, the hyperglobalization that is integral to the liberal order creates economic problems among the lower and middle classes within the liberal democracies, fueling a backlash against that order. Finally, the liberal order accelerated China's rise, which helped transform the system from unipolar to multipolar. A liberal international order is possible only in unipolarity. The new multipolar world will feature three realist orders: a thin international order that facilitates cooperation, and two bounded orders—one dominated by China, the other by the United States—poised for waging security competition between them.

John J. Mearsheimer is a foreign policy realist.

MIT Press
Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order
John J. Mearsheimer | R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago

See also

The Geopolitics
The Best of Both Worlds: Chinese Foreign Policy Through the Lens of Realism and Liberalism 

Shubham Swaroop

Jennifer Morgan and Sharan Burrow — Tackling The Twin Challenges Of Climate Change And Inequality

Bingo.

These crises are interlinked. The richest 10 percent are responsible for nearly half of carbon emissions caused by consumption, and yet all around the world, it's the poor and marginalised that are most at risk from the devastating effects of climate change.

Growing inequality and rising climate disruption are both the result of the "profit first" neoliberal economic model Davos elites have adopted in recent decades. The good news is that also means addressing climate change and inequality can go hand in hand. We can change the rules of the global economy to benefit people and the planet alike.…

Good luck with that. Nothing will happen until the next crisis to provoke the needed reset of the world order. If not then, will the last person left please turn off the lights as you leave.

Why not? The solution is to preempt economic rent and tax away the residual. That means the end of "capitalism" as the elite know it and have come to love it, and now believe it is the natural order of things.

You have heard of "class struggle," right?

Al Jazeera
Tackling The Twin Challenges Of Climate Change And Inequality

Jennifer Morgan and Sharan Burrow

Pence Vs. Xi at APEC — Trump decides to skip

Is accusing China of using debt as a weapon capitalist chutzpah on the part of Pence, when it's SOP under neoliberalism — "free markets, free trade, and free capital flows" — to put less powerful countries in debt to powerful countries to the degree that they need to go to the IMF for funding to meet debt obligations, the strings attached being giving up control of their institutional arrangements, fiscal policy and national sovereignty? 

I doubt Pence will fool anyone on this, but some countries will "go along to get along" with the US.

Reuters

China says no developing country will fall into debt trap by cooperating with China

For the Chinese idiom, see

Language Log
"China has no intention to touch the cheese of any country"
Victor Mair

See also

Yahoo!
APEC leaders divided after US, China spat
Ayee Macaraig, Andrew BEATTY | AFP

See also

The Week
Pence vows more trade war 'until China changes its ways'

Bonnie Kristian

See also

Sputnik International
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit Reveals Depth of US-China Division

See also

"We suggest a certain country matches its words with its deeds, rather than wag the finger at others," [Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying] said in the statement. "The country should treat all countries on an equal footing no matter big or small, respect other countries' right of following a development path that accords with their own national conditions and make real contributions to developing countries."
Ecns
China urges U.S. to stop wagging finger at others

Xinhua

See also

Full text of Xi's remarks at 26th APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting

Ecns
Xi calls for inclusive, rule-based world economy at APEC meeting

Xinhua

Also

Zero Hedge
"It Will Be A Cold War": APEC Summit Ends In Unprecedented Chaos After Dramatic US-China Showdown

Tyler Durden

also

SouthFront
US-Chinese Trade War Is To Escalate Further As Both Sides Are Not Going To Make Concessions

also

Reuters
APEC fails to reach consensus as U.S.-China divide deepens

also

Sputnik International
APEC Participants Adopt Final Declaration Excluding Some Controversial Issues
Related

Eisenhower's worst nightmare has come true, as defense mega-contractors climb into the cockpit to ensure we stay overextended....

The dependence on the private sector in the Pentagon and the intelligence community had reached such a point that it raised a serious question about whether the workforce was now “obligated to shareholders rather than to the public interest,” as Priest and Arkin reported. And both Gates and Panetta acknowledged to them their concerns about that issue.

Powerfully reinforcing that privatization effect was the familiar revolving door between the Pentagon and arms contractors, which had begun turning with greater rapidity. A 2010 Boston Globe investigation showed that the percentage of three- and four-star generals who left the Pentagon to take jobs as consultants or executives with defense contractors, which was already at 45 percent in 1993, had climbed to 80 percent by 2005—an 83 percent increase in 12 years.... 

Longish historical article putting things in perspective.

The American Conservative
America’s Permanent-War Complex

Gareth Porter

See also

Did "we" get our money's worth? It all depends on the meaning of "we."

Military Times
Price tag of the ‘war on terror’ will top $6 trillion soon
Leo Shane III

Jonathan Cook — Long Read: The neoliberal order is dying. Time to wake up

Analysis from the left mostly about British politics but inclusive of all aspects of neoliberalism as the policy, strategy and tactics of elite power.

Says "long read," but it is not that long. Worth a read even if you are not British since it is also an analysis of elite power as it relates to national politics and neoliberal globalization.

Let's hope Cook is correct in seeing the wave cresting. The question then becomes will the breaking of the wave result in world war as the elite desperately tries to hang on to its waning power and control.

True Publica
Long Read: The neoliberal order is dying. Time to wake up

Jonathan Cook, award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel; author, and public intellectual as a voice of conscience

Pratap Bhanu Mehta — A darkening horizon [for the liberal order]

As the recently much derided “liberal order” ebbs away, what is the ideological constellation that will replace it? The liberal order was often more an idea than a reality and in international politics, often not very liberal at all. But it operated within a series of normative horizons — economic centrism, openness to trade, multiculturalism, and so on. The flagbearers of that order are losing credibility all across the world, for a variety of reasons. Deep misjudgements on inequality, issues of identity and structural corruption made liberal, centrist politics lose its sheen. Of course, each country from India to Brazil, Hungary to the United States has its own historical specificity. But there are still common tropes that are running through the politics of these countries. Do these common tropes signal a new set of normative horizons? Here are some elements of the new constellation that will characterise the politics of more countries....

The Indian Express
A darkening horizon
Pratap Bhanu Mehta | vice-chancellor, Ashoka University

Paul Robinson — Asymmetrical rules

Back in September I presented a paper at a conference in Moscow on the topic of ‘Human Rights Reasoning and Double Standards in the Rules-Based Order.’ In this I pointed out that both Russia and the West claimed to be in favour of a ‘rules-based order’ and that each accused the other of breaking that order. The problem, I conjectured, derives from differing understanding of what the rules are and how they should be applied.

Russia believes in a traditional, Westphalian, order in which states are equal sovereign entities. The rules apply equally to all of them, regardless of who they are or what they do. States may only take action against other states with the permission of a superior court, in other words the United Nations Security Council. Of course, Russia doesn’t 100% abide by the rules of its own model, but its preferred option remains one of legal symmetry – the same rules apply to all.

By contrast, human rights reasoning has pushed the West in an opposite direction, towards a preference for legal asymmetry. In this model, the just and the unjust, those who respect and those who don’t respect human rights, are not legally or morally equal....

Liberalism as theology.

It's right and just when we do it but wrong when other's do it — because "freedom and democracy."

Irrussianality

Asymmetrical rules

Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

See also

Intel Today
Former CIA Director James Woolsey: “US meddles in foreign elections – but only for a very good cause”

Dani Rodrik — The great globalisation lie

Third way evangelists presented globalisation as inevitable and advantageous to all. In reality, it is neither, and the liberal order is paying the price....

The fundamental thing to grasp is that globalisation is—and always was—the product of human agency; it can be shaped and reshaped, for good or ill. The great problem with Blair’s forceful affirmation of globalisation back in 2005 was the presumption that it is essentially one thing, immutable to the way that our societies must experience it, a wind of change which there could be no negotiating or arguing with. This misunderstanding still afflicts our political, financial and technocratic elites. Yet there was nothing preordained about the post-1990s push for hyper-globalisation, with its focus on free finance, restrictive patent rules, and special regimes for investors. 

The truth is that globalisation is consciously shaped by the rules that the authorities choose to enact: the groups they privilege, the fields of policy they tackle and those they lay off, and which markets they subject to international competition. It is possible to reclaim globalisation for society’s benefit by making the right choices here.…

A world economy in which these alternative choices are made would look very different. The distribution of gains and losses across and within nations would be dramatically altered. We would not necessarily have less globalisation: enhancing the legitimacy of world markets is likely to spur global commerce and investment rather than impede it. Such a globalisation would be more sustainable, because it would enjoy more consent. It would also be a globalisation quite unlike the one we have at present.

Longish article with lots of history. Worth reading all of.

Dani Rodrik's Weblog
The great globalisation lie
Dani Rodrik | Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University

Joel Kotkin — The globalization debate is just beginning

On both sides of the Atlantic, there are now two distinct, utterly hostile, opposing views about globalization and multiculturalism. The world-wise policies of the former investment banker Macron play well in the Paris “bubble” — and its doppelgangers in New York, San Francisco, Tokyo and London — but not so much in the struggling industrial and rural hinterlands....

This will require something in short supply today: a reasoned approach. The fulminating xenophobia of a Le Pen or Steve Bannon may be repugnant, but equally unreasonable and out of touch are the trade dogmas of the Davos group or open borders notions now embraced by many on the left.

Finding a way toward some sort of great recalibration, a middle ground between extremes, may be difficult in these polarized times, but it may be the only way to address critical issues without making the future far worse than the recent past.

Democracy is supposed to handle this with compromise, but in a highly polarized environment compromise is seen as not only weakness but also betrayal.

Newgeography.com - Economic, demographic, and political commentary about places
The globalization debate is just beginning
Joel Kotkin | Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, CA and executive director of the Houston based Center for Opportunity Urbanism