How Liberalism’s Global Contradictions Gave Rise To Donald Trump
A new book by Patrick Porter, 'The False Promise of Liberal Order,' charts where American grand strategy went wrong, what led to the global backlash since 2016, and what is the future way forward.
By Sumantra Maitra
June 19, 2020
There are certain common perceptions in talk of a “liberal order†that is disputed as being mythical, in the masterful new book by Professor Patrick Porter, The False Promise of Liberal Order: Nostalgia, Delusion and the Rise of Trump. The book is the culmination of an argument, first elaborated in Porter’s 2018 monograph for the Cato Institute, that the idea of a single liberal order since 1945 (or 1989, depending on which liberal you ask) is a quasi-mythical idea, not based on reality. In fact, this almost theological faith essentially misunderstood global great power politics, resulted in imperial overstretch, and is the prime reason behind the global nationalist backlash observable since 2016.
Both foreign policy realists (classical/conservative and structural/neo) as well as foreign policy liberals/neoconservatives (institutionalists and interventionists) base their theories on the fundamental assumption that the world order is anarchic, in the sense that there’s no global policeman as great powers rise and fall and often overstretch themselves to eventual collapse or bankruptcy.
“Orders are hierarchies created by the strong to keep the peace on their terms. There have been many orders: Roman, Byzantine, Imperial Chinese, Ottoman, Mughal, Spanish, French and British,†Porter writes. But that’s where the similarities end.
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https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/19/how-liberalisms-global-contradictions-gave-rise-to-donald-trump/
