This week we’re talking about one of the big ideas that shaped the world after 1945: liberal internationalism. Free trade, international institutions, and democracy promotion were the three pillars meant to keep the peace and spread prosperity. For decades, they might have (depending on who you ask, of course). But something has clearly shifted, and we wanted to dig into what exactly that something is.
We frame the conversation around two competing views. John Ikenberry argues that the liberal order was a genuine institutional achievement: a system of rules and norms that even the hegemon agreed to be bound by. Marc Trachtenberg sees it differently: what looked like international cooperation was really just American power dressed up in multilateral clothing. That tension ran through the last 80 years or so of the international system, and it’s running through our discussion, too.
The reason this matters now is pretty obvious. The institutions that were built to sustain the liberal order — the UN, NATO, the WTO — are under more strain than at any point since the Cold War. The question isn’t really whether the order is, at an absolute minimum, in deep trouble. It’s whether it was ever what its defenders claimed it was in the first place, and whether anything coherent is replacing it.
We get into all of it! Realism versus liberalism, the Iraq War as a turning point, what the rise of China actually means for these debates, and why the post-Cold War moment of American unipolarity might have been the exception rather than the rule. Give it a listen.
