The Liberal Imperium is Dead

Philip Pilkington examines why the unipolar liberal-internationalist can no longer open the doors, and shows why Secretary of State Marco Rubio sees a new way through our new multi-polar reality.

When a magician reveals how his trick his done, that trick instantly ceases to hold its original power of fascination. This is why magicians guard their secrets so closely, to the extent that they formed secret societies like The Magic Circle and the52. Why would a magician break with his colleagues and reveal some of his tricks? One can only think that he would engage in such heresy only when he feared that the public was losing interest in the illusions that he was peddling. If the public refuses to buy tickets to a magic show, maybe they will fork over a few bucks to see how the tricks are done.

Something similar seems to be happening in so-called liberal internationalist circles. Faced with global chaos, rising non-Western multilateralisms like BRICS, and a second term for President Trump – all phenomena that their own failed policies played a large role in creating – they are inviting the public to line up and watch how the old tricks were done. The most standout example of this is an essay entitled ‘Trump’s Antiliberal Order’ published in Foreign Affairs by political scientists Alexander Cooley and David Nexon.

Cooley and Nexon effectively argue that the liberal internationalism was merely the packaging for pragmatic policies aimed at preserving a globalist order that operated in America’s self-interest. They seem to be arguing that this order can be stripped of its liberal form, but its practicalcontent should be allowed to remain intact. So, presumably, an enlightened Trumpist bureaucrat, after reading Cooley and Nexon’s essay, would remove the word “liberal” from a variety of institutions and let them carry on their work in the service of the American people. The problem, however, is that liberal internationalism is all form and no content.

This is immediately obvious from the way its proponents think and write. They almost always remain at a very high level of abstraction, which is why they like talking about “values” and other metaphysical notions rather than actual political, economic and social realities.

Take the example in Cooley and Nexon’s own essay where they contemplate Trump pulling forces out of Europe. The authors speculate that this might lead to the Europeans once again going to war with each other. They tackle this problem from the highest level of abstraction, making an airy historical argument about how the peace in Europe was only achieved through American intervention in the Second World War. In reality, if Germany invaded France tomorrow, the French would launch a nuclear missile from one of their Triomphant class and obliterate Berlin. War between India and Pakistan has not been avoided by missives from American political scientists on liberal values, but rather by mutually assured destruction. These are the realities that govern the world we live in – not “values”, liberal or otherwise.

The late American philosopher Hubert Dreyfus often spoke in his lectures on Heidegger of the experience of using a doorknob. When we enter and exit rooms, we do not even think about using a doorknob, we undertake our door-knobbing in almost subconscious manner. It is only when the doorknob gets stuck that we reflect on our activity. At this point, we might panic that we are trapped inside the room. Reading Cooley and Nexon’s essay one gets a distinct impression that the liberal internationalist doorknob has gotten stuck. The authors appear close to panic about the rise of non-Western multilateral organisations, like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). But they do not have the tools to analyse the emergence of these institutions because doing so would, for example, involve a discussion of relative changes in military and economic power globally. This would involve a complex argument that would have little time for any metaphysical discussion of “values”.

This retreat into metaphysical valuism is particularly evident when the authors discuss the Ukraine war. They attribute the resistance to the war on the right as “[reflecting] Trump’s own idiosyncratic obsessions” and conclude that: “If Trump were less enamored of Russian President Vladimir Putin more American conservatives would likely back aid to Kyiv.” They then go on a long rant about how conservatives and postliberals are dupes of Kremlin propaganda. Presumably if “fact-checkers” from the State Department’s Council on Countering Misinformation had been on the scene in 2015 to stop conservative intellectuals from following Alexander Dugin on Facebook then the Ukraine war would have been a consensus policy in the United States. This is truly juvenile stuff. A bloody war in Europe – and opposition to it can only be explained by brainwashing! Heaven forfend!

In fact, many on the right are concerned about how the Ukraine war has accelerated the decline of American power. The rise of the BRICS and the SCO have been greatly accelerated by the sanctions regime associated with the war. It is now basically consensus that the freezing of the Russian foreign exchange reserves threatens the hegemony of the US dollar. But Cooley and Nexon cannot contemplate such arguments because they would take us out of the realm of speculative idealism and into the concrete realm of material interests. The liberal-internationalist toolkit is too flimsy to deal with these hard realities and would disintegrate the moment that it met iron. This explains the retreat into Manchurian Candidate-style paranoia reminiscent of the McCarthyism of the Cold War era.

Once we understand the nature of the liberal-internationalist position its vacuity is quickly revealed for all to see – the rabbit was in the magician’s pocket and the bottom of the top hat contained a flap, after all! Cooley and Nexon claim that the liberal-internationalist order is there to defend American national interests, but neither author can concretely define what these interests are – beyond the maintenance of the liberal-internationalist order. Liberal-internationalist turtles, all the way down. For example, one would think that writing about American geostrategic power in 2025 would perhaps require a mention of the fact that interest payments on US government debt are now higher than the entire defence budget. What does this physical reality mean for, say, maintaining American troop presence in Europe? We are never told because “values”.

The liberal-internationalist framework was never an analytical one. Rather it was an ideology of the late liberal order. It was to American liberalism what Marxism-Leninism was to Soviet Communism. Like Dreyfus’ doorknob it functioned seamlessly as the physical realities that underpinned the liberal-internationalist order ran smoothly. But once that machinery started to break down – due to economic imbalances, a series of failed wars, fractures emerging in American domestic politics etc – the doorknob got stuck and those who once passed uneventfully through the doorway started to realise that they were trapped. Physical realities always governed the liberal-internationalist order – and physical realities will bury it. The Trump movement is merely an epiphenomenon for the old ideologues to focus their ire on.

What of these “values” anyway? In their essay Cooley and Nexon focus on “anti-corruption”. They share their concerns that anti-corruption might be deployed arbitrarily against Trump’s enemies:

A politicized Justice Department and Treasury Department could deploy the anticorruption measures found in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Foreign Extortion Prevention Act, and the Magnitsky Sanctions Program to persecute foreign officials who offend Trump or target foreign leaders’ opponents with time-consuming corruption investigations in return for payments or favors.

One gets the sense that the authors are beginning to wake up to the fact that corruption itself may be in the eye of the beholder. One of the million people who follow Nancy Pelosi’s Stock Tracker on X might have a very different conception of corruption than someone who vigorously supported the recent sanctions applied to Antal Rogan in Hungary. In the realm of anti-corruption, it seems that if we are not all Schmittians now, we will be soon – and so we will be back once more to those pesky political and economic realities that actually govern global affairs.

In a recent interview the new Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the unipolar moment that arrived at the end of the Cold War is over. Rubio recognized that this was always an inevitability:

“eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.”

How on earth this was ever controversial is baffling. Did the liberal internationalists really think that America would maintain global hegemony from here to Kingdom Come? The answer to that question brings us once more back to the abstract nature of the ideology: like the metaphysical concepts these ideologies deploy, the ideology itself is timeless in the minds of its proponents. Finite time is the realm of icky political, social and economic analysis; infinite time, on the other hand, is the stuff that Ivory Towers are built out of.

In the wake of the fall of global liberalism, those of us outside of these white castles in the sky are left with the world as it is. Our best bet in this rapidly changing world is in realism. We see the wreckage all around us and those who supervised demolition preaching the same “values” that they preached at every stage in the grim process of deconstruction. These values that caused so much destruction in the recent past are now worthless currency. A wheelbarrow of liberal-internationalist values today could not even get you a loaf of bread. The liberal-internationalists can take their wheelbarrows to world capitals today and they will encounter Chinese-built high-speed rail and Huawei telecoms networks. If they can convince the locals to take the wheelbarrow instead then more power to them. Meanwhile, the rest of us need to get to work figuring out where we fit in this brave new multipolar world.