Did Trump Really Kill the Liberal International Order?

But the order has been pronounced dead before. Who was the actual murderer? Was it George W. Bush, in Iraq, with the nuclear lies? Was it Barack Obama, in Syria, with the unenforced red line? Not surprisingly, where we point the finger says a lot about how we view the world.

Sweeping historical changes usually have a number of overlapping causes, all the more so when they’re global in scale. The liberal international order had plenty of enemies, and it has already taken quite a few blows. So is it finally dead, or will it rise once more from the tomb as Trump retreats from his Greenland rhetoric?

An autopsy requires first identifying the corpse. As the decade-long debate over the death of the liberal international order shows, no one quite agrees on what it was. Broadly speaking, though, the term refers to a set of institutions, rules, and values that guided international behavior, either in theory or in practice.

Many elements of this order—the United Nations, for example, or global conventions on human rights and preventing genocide—emerged out of the Second World War, only to be immediately hamstrung by the emerging Cold War conflict. Then, in the 1990s, optimistic U.S. policymakers hoped their belated dreams of a better world could finally be realized. Yet once again, complications quickly ensued.

Kosovo

The claim that Washington broke the liberal international order by intervening to create an independent Kosovo is a niche one. But it appeals to a particular kind of legalistic leftist with a penchant for contrarianism and geopolitical deep cuts.

In 1999, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic launched a brutal crackdown against ethnic Albanian separatists in Serbia’s Kosovo region. Having belatedly intervened to stop Milosevic’s genocidal war in Bosnia a few years earlier, the Clinton administration acted much faster this time. The United States bombed Serbia and organized a NATO-led, U.N.-backed peacekeeping force to Kosovo. This laid the groundwork for much of the international community to recognize Kosovo as an independent state in 2008—over Serbia’s strident objections.

For many liberal internationalists, who had watched U.S. President Bill Clinton’s dithering in Bosnia with mounting outrage, this prompt action represented one of the first examples of the envisioned Liberal International Order actually working the way that it was supposed to. Where Cold War dynamics had made such intervention by bodies such as the United Nations impossible since the Korean War, Russia was now too weak to object. As a result, NATO could move decisively to restore order and uphold human rights.

For critics such as Noam Chomsky, though, this was the whole problem. NATO’s unilateral military campaign, even against a notorious genocidaire, was U.S. neo-imperialism. More plausibly, they pointed to Washington’s support for Kosovar independence as a fundamental violation of the principle that international borders should not be changed by force. If nothing else, it was a precedent that Russian President Vladimir Putin was happy to cite when annexing Crimea two decades later.

Iraq

U.S. Marine Maj. Bull Gurfein pulls down a poster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in Safwan, Iraq, on March 21, 2003. Chaos reigned in southern Iraq as coalition troops continued their offensive to remove Iraq’s leader from power. Chris Hondros/Getty Images

In 2003, the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq was supposed to be a bigger, better version of Kosovo—toppling a brutal dictator, spreading democracy, and stabilizing the oil market in the process. Many prominent liberal internationalists were initially on board. But from the beginning, the hubris and recklessness were hard to miss. And while Bush made nods to multilateralism, assembling a “coalition of the willing” and seeking some sort of U.N. endorsement, there was no mistaking the underlying unilateralism.

Particularly among millennials, the ensuing disaster proved deeply disillusioning. For many, the Iraq War discredited the whole idea of humanitarian intervention, revealing the danger of U.S. power and the hypocrisy behind idealistic liberal rhetoric.

In this context, the risks of Russian rule-breaking or Iranian aggression seemed secondary to the risk of more needless forever wars. Whenever pundits, particularly neoconservative ones, suggested that U.S. passivity, or the actions of hostile powers, threatened the liberal international order, Iraq was the inevitable rebuttal.

While many critics of U.S. intervention argued that Iraq killed the liberal order, this wasn’t so much a causal claim about the war’s historical impact. Rather, they were insisting that the real danger lay in Washington’s hawkish impulses—and that even if the order wasn’t gone then, unchecked U.S. unilateralism would destroy it.

Syria

Syrian men evacuate a victim following an airstrike by regime forces in the northern city of Aleppo on Aug. 26, 2013. Syria’s opposition accused pro-regime forces of opening fire at U.N. weapons inspectors on their way to a suspected chemical weapons site outside Damascus. ZAKARIA ABDELKAFI/AFP/Getty Images

Between 2011 and 2016, Obama resisted repeated appeals to directly intervene in the Syrian civil war. Despite a growing death toll, and despite the regime of Bashar al-Assad repeatedly using chemical weapons in violation of Obama’s “red line,” Obama continued to believe that intervention would be counterproductive. By 2015, Russia had launched its own intervention, tilting the war in Assad’s favor. This led critics to conclude that Washington’s credibility had been seriously weakened and lament that U.S. inaction was killing what remained of the liberal international order.

Coming at a time when many still hoped that Obama could be persuaded to act, these claims had a clear rhetorical purpose. Yet the ongoing and widely publicized nature of Assad’s crimes, coupled with the role of hostile actors such as Russia and Iran, contributed—at least among those following the conflict—to the perception that global norms were quickly unraveling.

At the same time, the hand-wringing over Syria also revealed something deeply unsettling about the logic of the liberal international order itself. In the former Yugoslavia, Washington had eventually intervened to stop an unfolding genocide, thereby giving credence to the idea that some kind of order existed in the first place. In Rwanda, Darfur, and Congo, by contrast, the United States had allowed widespread violence to continue without anyone even worrying that the international order was at risk.

Syria provoked such a divisive policy debate in part because it lay at the racial and geographic fault lines of Washington’s worldview. The country wasn’t white and European enough to necessitate an intervention, but it wasn’t quite Black and African enough that Americans could ignore it, either.

Ukraine

Russia’s initial assaults against Ukrainian sovereignty in Crimea and the Donbas region led to another round of accusations that Obama had abandoned the international order to its death. Critics argued that, whereas a firm U.S. response could check Russian aggression, Washington’s weakness was enabling Putin and setting the stage for further assaults.

This alarm proved prescient, although it is telling that another precedent consistently went unmentioned. Putin’s first act of naked aggression against a neighbor was the 2008 invasion of Georgia. Washington offered relatively little by way of response. But because it happened while Bush was in office, it didn’t particularly fit with anyone’s theory of the case. Neocons stood accused of destroying the international order by being too aggressive, liberals by being too effete. In this dichotomy, Bush’s nonresponse to the invasion of Georgia just didn’t compute.

When Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, anguish over the fate of the world order reached a new level. Four years of Trump had already left the United States’ liberal internationalists in a state of despair. Now, the sheer brazenness of Russia’s attack represented a dramatic threat to both European security and the principle of sovereignty.

Amid the ensuing outcry, it was easy to note that U.S. pundits had been less worried when Washington was violating the principle of sovereignty in Iraq, or when Russia was bombing Syrian cities instead of Kyiv. For some of the people pointing this out, the goal was simply to condemn U.S. hypocrisy and leave it at that. But for those truly worried about the principles at stake, the cumulative nature of these affronts only made the situation more dangerous. If the liberal international order had always been imperfect and aspirational, deepening the disorder would only make things that much worse.

Gaza

Palestinians check a U.N.-run school housing displaced people in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, on June 6, 2024. The school was hit during an Israeli bombardment, leaving at least 33 dead, including women and children, according to local health officials. SAEED JARAS/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images

In the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, it quickly became clear that Israel’s response would not be bound by the laws of war. Yet the Biden administration, which had been so clear-eyed in condemning Russian crimes in Ukraine, continued to back Israel, even as the war took on an increasingly genocidal character.

Critics who had long complained about the hypocritical and racist character of the liberal international order saw Gaza as a breaking point. They argued that the scale of Israel’s crimes and the explicit nature of Washington’s support had finally made the hypocrisy too blatant for the United States and the world to ignore. Moreover, the fact that it was a Democratic and otherwise internationally inclined president setting policy made the hypocrisy feel that much deeper and irreparable.

Of course, it is hard to know just how much hypocrisy is too much for the world to bear. As with fears over the United States’ military credibility, fears over the country’s moral credibility often involve a fair amount of projection about how the world would or should view U.S. actions. It’s a deeply unjust paradox: the more clear-eyed one is about Washington’s record of abandoning allies or supporting genocide, the harder it is to believe that any new betrayal can definitively ruin the country’s credibility in the eyes of the world.

Greenland

Soldiers guard the harbor in Nuuk, Greenland, on Jan. 25. Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP/Getty Images

Amid dueling accusations that Washington destroyed the world order by being too aggressive or by not defending its allies aggressively enough, Trump has pulled off the rare reverse Goldilocks. In threatening to invade Greenland, Trump directed the United States’ most hawkish impulses against its closest allies. And when the result looked as is if it would blow up NATO, many in his administration saw that as further icing on the cake.

As a result, even people who had already declared the liberal international order dead were alarmed to see Trump feeding its body into the wood chipper. Perhaps Syria fell outside the racial and geographic limits of Washington’s concern. Even Ukraine, though European, had been firmly under Russian control for the entire Cold War. But however not-actually-global the global order was, there’s no denying that NATO succeeded in maintaining peace in the North Atlantic region.

Now, not only have European countries deployed troops to Greenland to deter Washington, but even most committed liberal internationalists on both sides of the Atlantic agree that it’s the wise thing to do. People who once imagined that NATO could expand to spread sovereignty and stability around the globe are now hoping that European unity can at least defend these values in a small part of it.

So long as a more peaceful, rules-based, and multilateral world appeared possible, and had the backing, however hypocritical, of the world’s strongest power, many countries saw a clear strategic interest in working toward this goal. But as even the dream dies, countries’ calculations will change in self-fulfilling ways.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s call for middle powers to unite represents a relatively idealistic response that seeks to preserve some measure of rules-based multilateralism. Alternatively, the leaders signing up for Trump’s Board of Peace seem to believe, more cynically, that they can bribe the U.S. president for protection.

But whatever approach countries are pursing, they are nonetheless preparing for a more chaotic, less democratic, and increasingly militarized world. Europe is rearming and cutting deals with autocratic powers while countries from Scandinavia to East Asia are reconsidering nuclear weapons. At this point, even if you think that the liberal international order was buried prematurely, it will struggle to claw its way out of the coffin.