Gaza, Ukraine and the Fall of the Liberal International Order, or: How Western Politics Got So Crazy and Why They Seem Poised Only to Get Worse

by eugyppius

Every day, I am more convinced that a great part of what is happening today reflects the fading “unipolar moment” of unchallenged liberal American hegemony and the concomitant “fall of the liberal international order.” This order established itself at the end of the Cold War in 1990, and met its demise – without anybody quite noticing – sometime after 2015. Trump’s election and Brexit were the first serious signs of popular opposition to major tenets of international liberalism, while the rapid economic development of China brought the People’s Republic to rough parity with the United States after 2010 and opposed the order for the first time from the outside. In consequence, we now live in a multipolar world, but with a political ethos still premised on American international ascendancy. I fear that this is a very big problem, and that it will only get worse.

The unipolar moment changed Western politics fundamentally. Because we had no serious global or ideological competitors after 1990, our leaders felt free to propagate a bizarre and unbounded species of turbo liberalism. Third-wave feminism, the esoteric doctrines of the rainbow LGBTQIA+ brigade, open-borders immigration and race politics, the ever-escalating climate agenda and similar strangeness all have their separate aetiologies, but what opened the door to them in the first place was the absence of any clear external threat. These are above all ideological luxuries which the elites of wealthy nations feel they are in a position to afford, but they are all facing increasingly stiff headwinds today. To take the measure of how much things have changed, consider German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s sudden demand for migrant “deportations on a grand scale” – political rhetoric that would have qualified him as a right-wing extremist just a few years ago. The politics of unbounded, unchallenged liberalism simply aren’t working like they used to, and now Scholz finds himself in an unexpected fight for political survival.

The collision of the international liberal programme with a new multipolar reality has international consequences too. The war in Ukraine is the clearest example, arising as it does from the American-directed programme of NATO expansion since the 1990s. While Russia remained weak, the United States and its European provinces could pursue their heedless enlargement of the liberal West with few consequences. After Russia recovered from its 1990s nadir and the unipolar moment drew to a close, however, war broke out in Ukraine, and NATO suddenly found itself committed to an expensive proxy conflict which it has few prospects of winning.

At the risk of reducing complex events to a single thesis, I’d also suggest that the Hamas attack on Israel may owe something to this dynamic. Some have alleged that Hamas was at least emboldened, or perhaps even enabled, by another product of American unipolarity, namely a policy shift inaugurated under Barack Obama (and continued under Joe Biden) to normalise dealings with Iran and achieve a “realignment” of American relations in the Middle East. The thesis remains unsupported, but it’s undeniable that Hamas rules Gaza today as a direct result of policies from the era of unchallenged Western liberalism. The Israelis under Ariel Sharon opposed the 2006 Palestinian elections, precisely because they feared the prospect of a Hamas victory. George W. Bush, however, insisted they take place; they furthered his vision of a democratic Middle East, and he thought “it would be good for Hamas to participate … because it would make them accountable to the people.”

All that this unbounded liberal vision really achieved, of course, was bringing Hamas to power: They won an upset victory, and after attempts to form a government with Fatah failed, they seized control of Gaza by putsch in 2007.

The American political establishment, selected for and formed within the era of unchallenged liberal hegemony, finds itself ill-equipped to understand and respond to the very new world they now inhabit:

Never before have we talked to so many top government officials who, in private, are so worried about so many overseas conflicts at once.

Officials tell us that inside the White House, this was the heaviest, most chilling week since President Biden took office just over 1,000 days ago.

Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates — who ran the Pentagon under presidents of both parties, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — tells us America is facing the most crises since World War II ended 78 years ago.

He explains the White House’s system overload like this: “There’s this gigantic funnel that sits over the table in the Situation Room. And all the problems in the world end up coming through that funnel to the same eight or 10 people. There’s a limit to the bandwidth those eight or 10 people can have.”

Not one of the crises can be solved and checked off. All five could spiral into something much bigger …

The list of these “crises” reveals the scattered attention of American strategists and their inability to distinguish genuine problems from false ones. Alongside very real issues like the Gaza war, Russia and its growing alliance with China, and a hostile Iran, they profess to be terrified also by North Korea and the spectre of social media disinformation and “domestic unrest.” (I know some of my readers will disagree, but I don’t think popular uprisings have any immediate prospect of destabilising developed Western nations, though that day may come.)

A familiar Cold War dynamic – the competition of rival power centres for influence over the developing world – is now returning to international politics, and Western liberal platitudes suddenly sound empty and unpersuasive:

For 20 months, the Biden administration has attempted to stake out the moral high ground against Russia, condemning its brutal war on Ukraine for indiscriminately killing civilians ….

But Israel’s counterattack on Gaza, its threats to mount a ground invasion and America’s tight embrace of its most important Mideast ally … have prompted cries of hypocrisy.

Such accusations are not exactly new in the Middle East conflict. But the dynamics of the dual crises have gone beyond Washington’s desire to rally global support to isolate and punish Russia for invading its neighbor.

Increasingly, the Middle East region is emerging as a renewed front in the struggle for influence in the Global South — the collective name for the developing nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America — pitting the West against Russia and China.

“The war in the Middle East will drive a growing wedge between the West and countries like Brazil or Indonesia, key swing states of the Global South,” said Clifford Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, a New York-based risk assessment organization. “That will make international cooperation on Ukraine, like sanctions enforcement on Russia, even harder.”

Speaking of Ukraine, White House spokesman John Kirby said in the wake of the Hamas attack that the US is “coming near to the end of the rope” on their support to the Kiev government and that their commitment will “not be indefinite.” Again, the United States is presently configured for a world in which its dominance is basically unchallenged, and without a serious rededication of resources it can’t sustain conflicts on multiple fronts.

A curious and related problem is the long-simmering infiltration of the United States by foreign intelligence and influence operations. Security discipline under the international liberal order became extremely lax, allowing rivals to penetrate deep into the fabric of politics and society at the very centre of the Western empire. Most relevant for the present Israel-Gaza conflict is the surprising infiltration of the US State Department by agents of the Iranian Foreign Ministry connected with Robert Malley, Biden’s special envoy on Iran. Among other things, these agents appear to have lobbied for favourable terms in the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme.

The far greater and longer-running operations, of course, are run by the Chinese. In a recent interview with the American broadcaster CBS, FBI Director Christopher Wray described the “comprehensive threat” that China poses to American security:

We have seen efforts by the Chinese government, directly or indirectly, trying to steal intellectual property, trade secrets, personal data – all across the country. We’re talking everything from Fortune 100 companies, all to smaller startups. We’re talking about agriculture, biotech, health care, robotics, aviation, academic research. We probably have somewhere in the order of 2,000 active investigations that are just related to the Chinese government’s effort to steal information.

Tellingly, Wray followed his warnings about extensive espionage with a lecture to the Chinese government to uphold the rules-based international order, demanding that “if they want to be a great nation, it’s time … to start acting like one.” I understand this is simply a media interview, but the tendency to lecture rivals and potential enemies on adherence to legal and moral principles just reeks of the blind naivete that characterises Western liberalism and that makes its adherents so ill-equipped to deal with serious conflicts and strategic problems.

In short, the liberal West spent an entire generation adapting to a world in which it faced no clear external threats, experienced no sharp boundaries to its political programme, and felt no particular need to persuade its citizens or outsiders of the superiority of its ideological vision. Its elites immersed themselves in various projects to shore up their social and political position, primarily by forging a series of high-low alliances with newcomers and minorities at the expense of their sceptical citizenries; and they embarked upon a series of doubtful luxury projects, among them the experimental and catastrophic effort to eradicate a virus via campaigns of house-arrest and mass vaccination. They readily contributed to the economic development of China, now their primary rival, while they fought extravagant wars to spread democracy and human rights. Now that unchallenged liberal hegemony is over, we find ourselves ruled by a gaggle of incapable, unoriginal, senile politicians brought to power when nobody believed their mediocrity would matter, because all the great struggles were thought to be behind us. It took decades of decay to bring us to this point, and I very much doubt all the rot can be reversed any time soon, if ever.

LINK