The Myth of the ‘Liberal International Order’
In his latest Bloomberg op-ed piece, Hal Brands, the globalist academic at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a fellow at the Trilateral Commission, claims that the world is gradually transitioning away from the “liberal international order” of the post-1945 era. We have entered, he writes, a “more cutthroat age” where “raw strength” matters more than rules. Brands’ evidence: the U.S. destroys drug boats and captures an indicted foreign leader; great powers redraw or attempt to redraw borders; international law and arms control are unraveling while “strategic rivalry intensifies.” Who is largely to blame? You guessed it: President Trump.
Brands blames Trump for “tearing down” the liberal world order, accusing the president of disdaining the post-1945 order that Brands describes as “comparatively humane and enlightened.” Historians, he writes, will view the fading post-1945 world order as a “golden age” of peace, prosperity, and expanding freedom. Thanks largely to Trump (though China and Russia share some of the blame), Brands writes, “[c]rucial norms and principles are coming undone.”
Brands’ column proves that even well-educated people can sometimes view history and the world through rose-colored glasses. Brands appears to be living and thinking in an Atlanticist’s bubble, where since 1945 the great issues have not been decided, to use Bismarck’s phrase, by iron and blood, but instead by international rules and global governance. Let’s take a closer look at the post-1945 liberal order that Brands mythologizes as “comparatively humane and enlightened.”
The post-1945 world included Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s absorption of many nations in eastern and central Europe, deporting whole populations under Soviet control, filling up his Gulag camps with perceived political enemies, bringing down what Churchill called an “iron curtain” across half of a continent, imposing a land blockade of West Berlin, occupying parts of Austria and northern Iran, and supporting communist parties throughout Europe and Asia.
This “golden age” of “peace and prosperity” also included the renewal of a bloody and destructive civil war in China, which claimed millions of lives and caused terrible destruction; the Korean War, which claimed between one million and two million lives; the French Indochina War, which killed between 500,000 and 1.2 million soldiers and civilians; China’s attacks on Kinmen and Matsu, which produced a U.S. nuclear threat; U.S. interventions in Iran, Guatemala, and Lebanon; the Soviet military crackdown in Hungary, the Suez Crisis, France’s debacle in Algeria; Castro’s triumph in Cuba, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Berlin crisis, and the Cuban Missile Crisis; Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which resulted in up to 30 million dead; the India-China war; Mao’s Cultural Revolution; the second Indochina War, which claimed over three million lives; U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic; the Six-Day War in the Middle East; the Soviet crackdown in Czechoslovakia; the Soviet-Chinese clash along the Ussuri River; the Yom Kippur War; Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia; China’s brief war with Vietnam; the Iranian Revolution; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the rise of an international terror network (PLO, IRA, ETA, Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof gang, Shining Path, Tupamaros); the Iran-Iraq War; the U.S. invasion of Grenada and intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua; the Tiananmen Square massacre; Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the First Gulf War; ethnic cleansing in the Balkans; the 9/11 attacks and the Global War on Terror; the Afghan and Iraq wars. Need I go on? Donald Trump had nothing to do with any of these events.
Brands quotes Trump adviser Stephen Miller: “We live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power… These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Just so, but Brands characterizes these words as “[not] exactly wrong” but “incomplete.” Miller was right, and so was Bismarck: “[I]t is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided . . . but by iron and blood.”
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