For decades, the contemporary world order, oftentimes referred to as the post-World War II liberal world order, has been argued about, agonized over, defended, lambasted, and the subject of enough speculative books and articles to fill the shelves of a medium-sized library.

And with good reason: world politics prior to the emergence of the current order was riddled with the bloodiest global and regional conflicts in history, and most thinking people wish to avoid returning to such a chaotic state of affairs.

But what if all of the clamor and din over the future of the liberal world order has glossed over its most important weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and the complex nature of the threats confronting it? Worse, what if those proposing solutions are simply doubling down on failed assumptions of the past?

That this liberal order—or what President Joe Biden and other Western elites like to call the “rules-based international order”—is confronting a sense of crisis is not a new observation. Ever since the United States heavily militarized its war against terrorism after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the global financial collapse of 2008, not to mention more recently Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, there has been plenty of soul-searching about the flaws and challenges to the current world order.

Now there are additional stressors from Russia’s war against Ukraine, specifically the escalating energy and inflation crises across Europe and the United States, along with stepped-up Chinese assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific and Beijing’s increasingly open and vocal opposition to the liberal world order itself.

Many in the West seem to believe that if NATO would just expand further in order to oppose Russia, and if it would begin openly confronting China in the Indo-Pacific—and if the West would fully commit to an even swifter transition away from fossil fuels toward “net-zero carbon emissions”—somehow the Western “rules-based order” can run world politics indefinitely.

This is not just wishful thinking, it’s whistling past the graveyard. Whether it’s being recognized or not, pressure is clearly building toward a moment of exacting change in world politics.

Connecting Past to Present

History is rife with examples of transformative moments in world politics that nobody saw coming. For example, there were the global wars of the French Revolution and the way Napoleonic France transformed conceptions of nationalism, the nation-state, and even war itself.

Or perhaps more relevant today is the events leading up to World War I. This was a war that no one saw coming but it had the effect of shattering centuries-old imperial empires—Austrian, Russian, Ottoman—and laying the foundations for an even more destructive world war two decades later.

Though no dots were being connected on how the world reached such a crisis point by 1914, in retrospect it’s all very clear: imperial powers who believed they would govern forever; a system of rigid military alliances in Europe that were poised to strike their enemies at the first sign of trouble; and independence movements within the multiethnic empires, oftentimes committed to the use of political violence to achieve independence.

The war itself was sparked in June 1914 by one of those violent scenes, when Serbian nationalists (some might call them terrorists) assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austrian empire.

It is increasingly clear we are living through one of those moments in history today; future generations will wonder how we did not see what was coming.

Instead of imperial empires, we have a liberal world order that claims to uphold “universal values,” and which many in the West—taking their cues from the Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama—believe represents “the end of history” in world politics.

Instead of rigid alliances, there is a dominant NATO military alliance which, according to Biden, is no longer just about defending Europe but “the rules-based world order.”

And instead of nineteenth and early twentieth-century anti-imperial and anarchist terrorists assassinating members of royal families and heads of state across Europe—and even U.S. president William McKinley in 1901—there is globalized mass-casualty-seeking terrorism, most notably Al Qaeda and global jihadi movements, but also white nationalist and neo-Nazi terrorists within Western countries themselves who also seek mass casualties and political upheaval.

To be clear, liberal values have proven to offer the best foundations for domestic political and economic systems and, when used efficiently, to positively influence global politics. In the early post-Cold War period, the world witnessed what liberal values can do at their best by extending freedom and opportunity to parts of the world that never had them before, notably to former Soviet republics, India, and China, and helped pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

However, Western governance of the liberal order has veered off of its efficient path in recent decades, in my view mostly due to Western hubris and a nearly universal certainty amongst Western elites that liberal values, liberal politics, and neoliberal economics are the only legitimate ways to organize domestic and international society. This hubris, and the overreach that has come along with it, has abetted the emergence of serious counter-movements that together pose a triple threat to world order.

The first consists of challenges from powerful non-Western states, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and, to a lesser extent, India, and even NATO-member Turkey. Each increasingly views Western dominance in world politics as a fading enterprise, with some—notably China and Russia—planning new partnerships and alliances for a post-Western world. Note the difficulty in maintaining global sanctions against Russia outside of Western countries, despite Moscow’s brutal violations against Ukraine. Ironically, the biggest threat to Russia comes not from global sanctions but from the unexpected weakness of its military.

The second comes from powerful non-state actors, most importantly Al Qaeda and the global jihadi movement which has been at war against the West, and Arab and Muslim governments friendly with the West, for generations. This movement views the twenty-one years since 9/11 as an extraordinary success: the United States fought two bloody and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with a hugely expensive, controversial, (and ongoing) global war on terrorism. Despite losing senior leaders in Al Qaeda and affiliated groups, the movement is patiently building strength in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, Africa, and elsewhere, hoping to orchestrate another 9/11-style attack, perhaps this time with a nuclear device.

The third is the big wildcard: challenges from within the Western world itself, notably nationalist and populist movements rising in many liberal democracies, including the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany. To state the obvious, without liberal democracies leading, there is no “liberal world order.” Across the West, millions of voters are rising up against many facets of liberal openness, including globalization, immigration, and, increasingly, high energy costs associated with green transitions. Governing elites in the West dismiss these legitimate grievances at their own electoral peril.

The Liberal World Order and Its Discontents

Before discussing ways to address these combined threats to the liberal order, it is necessary to review its basic foundations and the recent missteps committed in its name.

First, it is important to recognize that the liberal order is not a U.S. thing, even if the United States has been its titular and tangible leader since World War II. It’s a Western thing, grounded in Western liberal philosophy, and Western notions of liberal internationalism.

We see this most clearly in the four big institutions—the United Nations (UN), NATO, World Trade Organization (WTO), and European Union (EU)—that are the foundation of the post-World War II liberal order. The UN manages international law, NATO manages international security, the WTO manages international economics, and the EU represents the exemplar of “post-sovereignty liberalism” (for which won it a Nobel Peace Prize in 2012).

Again, there is plenty to praise here: this institutional order played a crucial role in bringing a peaceful end to the Cold War and in helping to facilitate the greatest period of shared prosperity in world history.

But in many ways, these successes have contributed to the order’s potential unraveling. That’s because, after the Cold War ended, each of the foundational institutions endeavored unrealistically to expand their missions too far and too fast.

Indeed, the biggest mistake supporters of global liberalism have made over the past seventy-five years is presuming that the post-World War II order and its corresponding institutions ushered in what the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire would call “the apotheosis of human history” and that this new world could escape the traditional forces that drive international relations, such as nation-states, nationalism, and counter-ideologies. Once the Cold War ended, this view was injected with steroids.

We see this in the major transformations that the UN, NATO, WTO, and EU underwent in the 1990s. Two of them—the WTO and EU—didn’t even come into existence until the 1990s. The WTO was a vastly more expansive and ambitious version of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) born of the Bretton Woods system in 1944 while the EU was a more expansive and ambitious version of its Cold War predecessor, the European Economic Community.

The same goes for new expansive roles for the UN and NATO. What were once foundations of stability after World War II—keeping peace and ensuring prosperity during the Cold War—became “apotheosis institutions” bent on the fundamental transformation of world politics.

The pushback to each has been unsparing and helped bring about the pivot point we face today with each institution and the world order more broadly under duress.

The UN, for example, began the post-Cold War period on a high note, with a Security Council resolution supporting the U.S.-led war to liberate Kuwait after Iraq’s invasion in the summer of 1990. But the organization soon found itself stalemated in the 1990s over the bloody civil wars in the Balkans—particularly in Bosnia and Kosovo—as Russia and China began exercising their veto power in the Security Council to prevent any expansive UN action.

Nonetheless, a major move was undertaken in the late 1990s to transform the mission of the UN from managing relations between sovereign states to supporting humanitarian interventions within them. By 2005, the UN unveiled its new responsibility to protect (R2P) doctrine, based on a strictly Western liberal “post-sovereignty” view of international human rights law. This was something sovereignty-sensitive countries like Russia and China uneasily accepted up until the 2011 UN-authorized no-fly zone in Libya, which quickly turned from a limited humanitarian intervention carried out by NATO members to protect civilians into an expansive regime change operation.

The blowback was swift and unsparing. When a humanitarian crisis erupted later that year in Syria, Russia and China blocked any UN role at all out of fear of “a replay of the Libya scenario.” Syria today remains a killing field, Libya is a failed state, and the UN’s credibility has yet to recover.

NATO is much in the news lately, having discovered newfound unity and purpose following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But let’s not forget that NATO also underwent significant changes after the Cold War, evolving from a military alliance defending Western Europe to a globalized organization involved in out-of-area humanitarian interventions, most notably in Kosovo in 1999 (unauthorized by the UN) and Libya in 2011.

It also expanded from sixteen member states at the end of the Cold War to thirty today, with Sweden and Finland soon to be included. Along with this growth came a new functionality, beginning in the mid-1990s, to serve as “a catalyst” for advancing democracy, market liberalization, and the protection of human rights, including the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. No doubt these are all worthy goals but is it any wonder Russia, China, India, and many other non-Western countries have grown increasingly distrustful of the organization? And this was long before NATO described its new mission in June 2022 as “upholding the rules-based international order”—specifically directing its attention not just to Russia and Ukraine, but to China and Taiwan as well.

None of this is to downplay the need for a strong response to aggressive Chinese actions across the Taiwan Strait or elsewhere, including, if necessary, NATO out-of-area operations. But the more the organization grounds its plans and operations as upholding “universal liberal values,” the more it exposes its true aspiration of becoming a League of Nations-type collective security organization for a world of (it hopes) ever-expanding democracies.

Regarding the WTO, I will not overly criticize the goal of expanding liberal markets and free trade, which both the GATT and WTO have accomplished. However, specifically, as it relates to China, we have seen the ideological underpinnings of the WTO based more on end-of-history certainty, and full faith in liberal peace theory, than the realities of a rising Asian superpower with traditional geostrategic interests and goals.

The historic bet made by the WTO on China’s accession to the organization in 2001 was that as long as China remained true to market economics and integrated into Western institutions, it would inevitably transform into some form of liberal democracy.

Over the past twenty years, China’s growth has exploded thanks to its integration with the West but its political system has gone backward. As the Stanford economist Elizabeth Economy put it, China has become “an illiberal state seeking leadership in a liberal world order.” Ironically, just a few years ago it was widely assumed in the West that China would seamlessly replace the United States as the leader of the global liberal economic system. Now, many of those same voices are clamoring for renewed hawkish American leadership, as tensions continue to escalate between the world’s two largest economic and military superpowers.

Finally, there is little need to rehash all of the troubles confronting the EU in recent years. Suffice it to say, what was once the shining example of “post-sovereignty liberalism” is now almost a how-not-to guide on centralized decision-making by small groupings of governing elites, increasingly out of touch with their often-rowdy democratic underpinnings.

This was most vividly on display during the migration crises in the mid-2010s, which led many to question the bedrock assumptions regarding the status of borders and national sovereignty within Europe, and of the centralized influence of Brussels. The result has been events such as Brexit, the election (and re-election) of Viktor Orban in Hungary, and an overall rise of populist, nationalist, and nativist movements across the continent. And now, along with continued tensions over immigration and economic globalization, the EU’s supposed world-leading “clean energy policies” are also under enormous strain, as the public grapples with the stark energy vulnerabilities exposed by Russia’s war against Ukraine.

It is important to note that—as with China and the WTO—it was once widely assumed that fully integrating Russia into Western European energy markets would all but guarantee a more restrained and peaceful Russia. The reasoning came straight from liberal peace theory: Russia’s costs of severing ties from its bad behavior would outweigh any potential gains.

This belief was so strong that some countries were willing to completely wean themselves off of their own fossil fuels—and in the case of Germany, nuclear power as well—to rely almost entirely on Russian oil and gas as they developed clean energy economies.

All of those assumptions have been dashed after the invasion of Ukraine as Europe scrambles for new energy supplies (including coal) to keep its lights on. Though most European governments still support a 100 percent fossil-free future, the path ahead is rife with challenges, not least of all China’s plan to become Europe’s dominant supplier of renewable goods such as lithium batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, and the rare-earth materials that power them. If Europe is not careful, it may simply trade one hostile supplier of vital energy needs for another.

Reality And Renewal

These are some of the most obvious ways in which the liberal world order—and the core components of it—has overextended itself in recent decades, aiding the rise of serious counter-movements from the outside and increasing dissent from within.

However, all is far from lost with regard to future peace and stability in world politics, and the West’s important role in helping to ensure it.

In fact, Western liberalism has been such a dominant force on the landscape of world politics for centuries—particularly the past century—primarily because it contains the seeds of its own adaptation and renewal. This is the historic advantage liberal democracies have over their non-democratic competitors and adversaries: an ability to fight within and amongst themselves over proper courses of action, experiment with different policies, pull back and try something else, all while being held accountable by voters and the transparency of a free press.

These are strengths, not weaknesses, of the West even if it often looks like fragility to the outside world and critics within. We should never discount the ability of Western leaders to recognize the perils of the moment and alter course accordingly.

History offers such examples. In the 1940s, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill forged a liberal democratic alliance during World War II. Following the bleak 1970s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher accomplished something similar, helping foment a peaceful end to the Cold War. Even if Biden and new British prime minister Rishi Sunak do not prove to be historic turnaround artists, at least these two leaders are trying to shake off the cobwebs of what has become all-too-routine Western policymaking.

Sunak is seeking to revitalize a British economy now projected to slip outside of the top ten global economies for the first time in centuries. And Biden has pushed several initiatives to boost U.S. leadership, including the CHIPS and Science Act to reduce dependence on foreign suppliers of sensitive microchips and the Inflation Reduction Act, which incentivizes U.S. ingenuity in renewable energy technologies to compete directly against China in the global marketplace.

These are good starts but Western leaders must do more to address the multi-dimensional threats to the contemporary global order.

First and foremost, they must begin viewing the world through the eyes of others, recognizing that what Westerners consider “universal values,” others see as Western countries advancing their own interests. A new respect for others’ perspectives may not advance “global liberalism” (at least not in the short run) but it could lead to a good deal of peaceful and productive coexistence, including through global institutions of more modest scale and scope.

Second, they must take stock of the ill effects of Western-led globalization. In regions that have not benefitted from globalization, including much of the Arab and Muslim world, and for Western populations resentful of the changes coinciding with increased economic and political openness, anti-liberal sentiment has become a contagion helping to fuel both militant jihadism and white-populist nationalism.

The West needs new long-term strategies to redress these ill effects globally and locally. These must include a new approach to development assistance abroad and a new appreciation of the right of all nation-states—including those in Europe—to protect the economic well-being of their own citizens and control migration flows within their own borders.

A little give on these issues will not harm the foundations of Western liberalism and would go a long way toward renewing its credibility for the current age. The West invented a political ideology based on innovation and re-imagination. These qualities are required now more than ever.

Stuart Gottlieb teaches American foreign policy and international security at Columbia University, where he is a member of the Saltzman Institute of War & Peace Studies. He formerly served as a foreign policy adviser and speechwriter in the United States Senate (1999-2003).

Image: Reuters.