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Resting on your laurels crushes them

Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose stopped by last week for a public chat with SAIS professor Eliot Cohen, who was once upon a time his youthful professor at Harvard.  Their theme was US foreign policy and the future of the global liberal order.  Underlying the good-natured joshing between old friends and colleagues was a sharp disjunction in their views of the world and what the proper role of the United States should be.

Rose played the full-throated optimist.  Think how much better an average American life is than Napoleon’s:  what did he use for toilet paper?  Would you want to go to his dentist?  Life expectancy and physical body size are increasing.  Poverty is down.  Economic, social and political development go together and are all on the upswing.  There is a general recognition that peace is better than war, cooperation is good, and capitalism works, even if unchecked markets are problematic.  The global liberal order, a hybrid “good enough” system, was in place by the 1940s under US hegemony, which provides vital global public goods.  The end of the Cold War brought an almost effortless expansion eastwards.

The primary role of US foreign policy in Rose’s view is to sustain, maintain and deepen this system.  Washington should first of all do nothing that damages the global liberal world order.  It should prevent or avoid great power wars, in particular involving China.  It should protect the global commons (high seas, atmosphere, outer space, cyberspace).  It should maintain and deepen free trade.  Everything else is gravy.

Eliot agreed on the material progress that the world has made but challenged Gideon on two fronts:

1. There are real risks to the liberal order originating from the darker forces of human nature.  Competitive models present challenges that should not be ignored.
2. World history is replete with big disjunctions that depend on individual choices, like the decision of the Archduke Ferdinand not to retire to his hotel on June 28, 1914 after the first assassination attempt in Sarajevo.

Agency cannot be ignored in favor of structure.  The triumph of the liberal world order is not inevitable but needs to be nourished and maintained against forces that would happily destroy it.

On the issue of global governance, Gideon recommended Stewart Patrick’s “Global Governance Is Getting Messier. Here’s How to Thrive” in the latest Foreign Affairs, which underlines the jury-rigged but still more or less effective system we are living with.  He added that it is important the US tend its role as hegemon by making sure it behaves well and correctly so that it is accepted widely as a legitimate authority. 

While agreeing with Gideon in this last respect, I confess to grave doubts about his conception of the US role in the world.  It is not sufficient to sustain, maintain and deepen the system, managing the rise of China but little more. There are two reasons:

1. The global liberal order is based on concepts that are universal, in particular human rights.  If you believe “all men are created equal,” their treatment in autocratic societies (including China) and the treatment of women in many countries is not something you can write off to historical circumstance, cultural differences or your own powerlessness.
2. The global liberal order–like its trading arm–needs growth.  It cannot sit self-contented and wait for a Berlin Wall to fall.  It certainly didn’t do that during the Cold War and there is much less reason to do it now. 

Gravy is in the eye of the beholder.  But any worldview that relegates the fundamentals of the liberal order to “gravy” can’t have it quite right.  Resting on your laurels crushes them.