Where do you stand on the declining liberal order debate? More bad news for liberal international order

More on declining liberal international order I've dug up.

So if one guy can blow up the liberal international (institutional) order, than the order is not all that its cracked out to be. I've been making a similar argument in my book on Asian regional architecture, but from the angle that the liberal international order is more resilient precisely b/c it rests on norms and institutions.  Dan Drezner raises this point channeling a tweet presents the following.

As President Trump continues to wreak havoc, questions are being asked about the resiliency of the rules-based liberal order. Adam Elkus is a smart guy I follow on Twitter; maybe you should, too! But in response to much gnashing of teeth in the past week over this question, he tweeted the following: “If the Rules-Based Liberal Order can be blown up by one man within a 4-year time span then people can’t still unironically talk about institutions and the binding power of norms.”

If Elkus is correct, then it’s a pretty damaging blow to liberal institutionalists. It would turn out that all of the trappings of the postwar global order rested not on rules or norms, but on raw American power. Is he correct?

Foreign Affairs posted this interesting poll of foreign policy experts last year (May/June 2017) on whether they agreed/disagreed with the idea that the postwar liberal order is in "grave danger" The forecast looked gloomy. A year later, the prognosis is probably worse. There's a slew of new pieces discussing how Trump is destroying the liberal international order:

Dan Byman in Lawfare, stating that even if Trump exits after one term, the damage may not be easily reversible. In particular, the Trump years have signaled to the world the messiness of US domestic politics and the possibility that a substantial number of Americans may not want a liberal order.  As Byman argues, "A successor to Trump can try to renew these commitments but must do so with the world recognizing that a sizeable share of Americans oppose these traditional components of the world order and that a leader championing these Americans might again gain power." This was similar to Drezner's comments.

Robbert Kagan discusses the US as a rogue superpower that's not only rejected the liberal order, but is "milking it for narrow gain, rapidly destroying the trust and sense of common purpose that have held it together and prevented international chaos for seven decades."

Fareed Zakaria argued that the main headline of the US-North Korea summit last week was not the praise lavished onto Kim Jong Un, but the cancellation of military exercises and his allusion to reducing US troop commitment. China ended up being the big winner out of the summit.

In a CATO report, Patrick Porter finds policymakers nostalgic for the liberal order. Is it time to move on?

G7, Trade Disputes, and the Decline of Liberal Internationalism

“What worries me most is the fact that the rules-based international order is being challenged — quite surprisingly not by the usual suspects, but by its main architect and guarantor, the U.S.,” - European Council President Donald Tusk.

"When does a feud become a separation? A separation a divorce? When do arguments, sharp-tongued put-downs and perceived betrayal among allies become the collapse of the Western-dominated order that has ruled the world, under U.S. leadership, for the past seven decades?" - Karen DeYoung, Washington Post.

Washington Post June 10 2018 (Photo Credit: AFP)

These are the headlines underlining (or undermining) the 2018 G7 Summit in Canada,  capped by President Trump's early departure from the G7 and decision to withdraw US support joint statement. At the center of this debate is the Trump administration's threat to the international trade architecture as President Trump threatens to slap tariffs on goods - steel, aluminum, and automobiles in particular - of our closest allies in the name of national security. These allies include Canada, Germany, and Japan. Although there might be some "nuggets of truth" to Trump's claims on trade, most analysts believe the US will bear a significant economic cost in a trade war, translating into the loss of millions of jobs.  I don't have the economics or math background to prove to what extent Trump's trade policies would help or hurt the US economy, but if there's anything I learned from my IPE class in graduate school, it's that international trade always carries winners and losers. Steel and aluminum producers in the US may get their jobs back as Trump rises tariffs on foreign imported metals. But what about all the US manufacturers who rely on lower cost materials to make their products? What about the US pork and dairy farmer who will face retaliatory tariffs in Europe. The Washington Post had a great feature story on a sausage-making manufacturer in Ohio who will potentially lose millions of dollars b/c of Trumps steel tariffs. Here's an excerpt:

Bill Adler was invited last year to bid on a contract to make commercial sausage stuffers for a company that wanted to replace its Chinese supplier. The customer had just one non­negotiable demand: Match China’s price.

Adler, owner of metal-parts maker Stripmatic Products, thought he could. But even as he readied his proposal, talk of President Trump’s steel tariffs sent the price of Stripmatic’s main raw material soaring.

In April, with prices up nearly 50 percent from October and the first wave of tariffs in place, Adler’s bid failed. His costs were too high.

Today, instead of taking business from China, Adler worries about hanging onto the work he has. He hopes that the president’s tariffs are just a negotiating tactic.

Washing machines are another product in which trade tariffs, initially put in place to reduce competition from foreign competitors such as LG and Samsung, have backfired as those companies have continuously moved production to avoid tariffs, and ultimately moving production to the United States itself, complete with tax breaks and subsidies while creating US jobs. Here's a PBS video exploring if trade tariffs actually help US workers.

A looming trade war with China also stands to have the US losing billions, particular among US farmers as demonstrated in this clip from Vice News.

This is not only about trade. The rift at the G7 has broader implications for the liberal international order. The Trump administration has battled its allies on other issues including climate change (the US pulled out of the Paris Accords);  non-prolilferation (the US pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal). Some questioned whether Trump was looking after US or Russian interests as Trump called on the G7 to reinstate Russia as part of the G8. Max Boot headlined an article stating the US turned the G7 into the G6 vs. the G1.

In his PostEverything colum, Dan Drezner is circumspect about the possible long term damage of Trump's "bad-cop/bad-cop" approach to global affairs. Perhaps the most likely pathway linking Trump to a longer US withdrawal from the liberal order is increasing polarization in the US which promotes Trump's nationalist/anti-liberal policies. He ends the piece by stating. "Trump could get reelected. if that happens, the tombstone for the current order can safely be planted."

If there's any optimism, though, we need to remind ourselves that America has faced worse, and has tended to rebound from tumultuous periods (i.e. Civil War in the 1860s, the 1930s depression, riots of the 1960s). There is always recourse to head back to the political center - or return to some consensus. 

Strategic Narratives

I've been thinking a lot about foreign policy narratives - and in particular the rise of "restraint" and the decline of "liberal internationalism" as dominant narratives. Beyond U.S. foreign policy, however, one might consider global narratives. A piece in Foreign Affairs by Ian Bremmer and Joe Kennedy III gets at this:

Today, however, non-Western powers are gaining political and economic influence, and no longer feel that the global architecture created in the late 1940s fits their purposes and their ambitions. They’re right. But in response, the Trump administration seems content to let the old order collapse—and even help accelerate that process—while seeming unwilling to use American power to create a new and better one.

In a slightly different twist on how narratives influence foreign policy - more at the domestic than the grand strategy level -  CSBA published a piece on how authoritarian states have used information warfare as a means to alter narratives within domestic politics. The title is "Countering Comprehensive Coercion: Competitive Strategies Against Authoritarian Political Warfare."

And in a  piece by Aaron Friedberg on visions of international order, the author gives much more attention to ideas and ideology. Friedberg writes:

If they wish to respond effectively to these new realities, American and allied policymakers cannot afford to downplay the ideological dimension in their own strategy. Beijing’s obsessive desire to squelch dissent, block the inward flow of unfavourable news and discredit ‘so-called universal values’ bespeaks an insecurity that is, in itself, a form of strategic vulnerability. China’s rulers clearly believe the ideological realm to be a crucially important domain of competition, one that they would be only too happy to see the United States and the other Western nations ignore or abandon....


... Last but not least, the experience of the past century suggests that, if America’s leaders are serious about mobilising and sustaining the bureaucratic focus, domestic political support and economic resources necessary to wage a protracted strategic competition against a powerful and determined rival, they are going to have to cast the challenge, at least in part, in ideological terms. Geopolitical abstractions and economic statistics may be important, but historically what has moved and motivated the American people is a recognition that the principles on which their system is founded are under threat. There is an undeniable risk here of fear-mongering and overreaction, but at this point excessive caution and a continuing refusal to face facts may be an even greater danger. What is needed instead is a sober assessment of the challenge in all its dimensions, a clear articulation of the measures necessary to meet it, and leaders in Congress, the executive branch and the private sector who are capable of conveying both to the public.

The attention given to ideology leaves the door wide open for research on narratives.

North Korea Diplomacy in 2018 - A News Roundup

A roundup of some of the best analysis I’ve seen on North Korean diplomacy, the inter-Korea summit and the US-North Korea summit.

June 12, 2018 (Post-Summit Analysis)

• Victor and Sue Mi Terry provide their assessment of the summit. Victor also write an op-ed in the NY Times. Basically, as messy, idiosyncratic, and incomplete as the summit was, we're in the end still in a better place than before.
• My initial reactions were similar to Andrei Lankov's when I read the joint statement: is that it?
• Here's the idiotic propaganda video made by Trump about the choice North Korea can make. Definitely a must show for my students. To bad it fails to mention that the level of openness required to achieve such levels of investment in North Korea would jeopardize Kim's stronghold over his country. 
• Anna Fifield shares her notes, reflecting back a decade earlier when the NY Philharmonic visited North Korea, and the atmosphere of the summit today and whether the prospects for change are for real this time. 
  

May 30, 2018

·        Moon Jae-in's diplomatic acumen and delicately playing middle man in keeping US-NK summit alive.        

·     David Igantius on Trump's break-up letter and what the implications could have been. In retrospect, Trump was giving Kim a taste of his own medicine in walking away from talks. This shouldn't have been a complete surprise given the message coming from Trump days before the letter, and North's shifting tone and no-show to a meeting in Singapore. What's the meaning of this zig-zag approach to the Summit.

May 8, 2018

·        From Van Jackson on what Kim wants from Trump

·        Victor Cha on the success of the inter-Korea summit raising the stakes and expectations for US-North Korea meeting.

·        Anna Fifield on whether South Koreans believe peace talks with North Korea will be different this time

·        Victor Cha and Katrin Katz on The Right Way to Coerce North Korea. They take a pretty hardline stance, which some might criticize as unnecessarily escalating tensions.

·        Chung-in Moon, who advises the Moon Jae-in administration, with a much more optimistic view of the inter-Korea summit and the path to peace.

·        Moving away from diplomacy, Jung Pak, former CIA analyst and now at Brookings, offers a great profile of Kim Jong Un in her piece, The Education of Kim Jong Un

Fearless Speech Index

I recently joined Heterodox Academy which encourages academics to support a diversity of viewpoints.  This week's newsletter highlighted an op-ed by professor Adam Grant at Wharton who encourages more arguing and fighting at home which helps train kids to grow up to be more creative and open minded. 

In that post, a quote struck me as consistent with my own observations and experience: "Universities—ideal homes for constructive disagreement—can now be places where students and professors alike often feel silenced." Results from a survey tracking a "fearless speech index" can be found here. Researchers are trying to determine to what degree students feel comfortable speaking about the following topics in class, and the reasons why they do/don't speak up about 3 issues: race, gender politics. There's a "control" category for comparison. The topic of race generated the most discomfort, and criticism from  other students (not professors) ended up being the biggest concern/reason for not speaking out. As an Asian-American, race is not as uncomfortable for me, but as a conservative Christian, gender is probably the hardest. 

A Century of Communism

It's been 100 years since Communism came into power. The Washington Post's Will Englund presented a cool graphic timeline or the "Red Century." Until I read this brief account, I had never considered the Communist Revolution as a social movement with major implications for world politics. But of course that's exactly what it is. It's not a single movement of course, even though there was an international organization (Comintern) set on expanding communism globally. But the Revolution has all the makings of a social movement if one considers mass mobilization, the challenge to authority, and the diffusion of ideas. The puzzle for me is why and how communist movements/parties/governments virtually everywhere turned to authoritarianism and repression, especially if communism in its pure form was an ideology which was to bring equality.

Anyway, this is a mental note to consider the Russian Revolution and the spread of communism as an example of social movements transforming world politics. I might also use the Red Century in my Intro to IR class next semester to educate students about Cold War history.

Nobel Peace Prize Goes to anti-nuclear group, ICAN

This year's Nobel Prize went to the International Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a group made up of more than 450 civil society organizations in some 100 countries around the globe. To give some background on their campaign from their webpage:

"ICAN began in Australia and was officially launched in Vienna, Austria in 2007. Our campaign’s founders were inspired by the tremendous success of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which a decade earlier had played an instrumental role in the negotiation of the anti-personnel mine ban convention, or Ottawa treaty. Since our founding, we have worked to build a powerful global groundswell of public support for the abolition of nuclear weapons. By engaging a diverse range of groups and working alongside the Red Cross and like-minded governments, we have helped reshape the debate on nuclear weapons and generate momentum towards elimination."

Source: http://www.icanw.org/campaign/campaign-overview/

I was a bit surprised that a diffuse transnational umbrella organization like ICAN would receive this year's peace prize, which usually resonates more strongly (in my opinion) when its awarded to a single individual or organization, rather than a campaign. When the International Campaign to Ban Landmines was awarded the prize in 1997, it was jointly awarded with its founder, Jody Williams. Perhaps the Nobel Prize Committee felt the issue of nuclear disarmament was especially important this year given the North Korea crisis and the potential unravelling of the Iran nuclear deal. But other "political" reasons may include the trouble/controversy of giving the award to an individual who may not deliver, as noted by the growing criticism against Nobel winner Aung Sang Suu Kyi and her silence in the face of the Rohingya crisis. Or perhaps there was a lack of clear consensus or frontrunner for the peace prize this year. Finally, it may just be a nod to large scale transnational campaigns like ICBL which won the prize two decades ago, and to give an idealistic movement like ICAN extra credibility and symbolic leverage in the fight to bring about a nuclear free world.


If I were still doing research on transnational campaigns, I would explore how activists from ICAN learned from and emulated the experience of ICBL. For my current research on the politics of peace, I would probably want to interview a number of ICAN activists and study their profile to understand how and where their beliefs about nuclear disarmament come from and how they engage proponents of nuclear deterrence.