The Liberal International Order: Living on Borrowed Time
Toro Hardy explains how the liberal international order is being squeezed out of oxygen, arguing that crash illiberalism cannot be the answer.
Referring to the emergence of the liberal international order, Daniel Deudney and John Ikenberry wrote: “In the wake of the Second World War, the United States and its allies created a political, economic, and strategic order that was explicitly conceived as a solution to the problems that led to the depression and world war”. (Deudney and Ikenberry, 1999).
Within this process, the role played by the United States was fundamental. It promoted the creation and shouldered with its strength a rules-based international order and a wide web of cooperative international institutions.
The mistake that America didn’t repeat
A similar international order could also have emerged in the aftermath of World War One, thus avoiding the era of fascisms and a second and even more devastating global conflict. Indeed, the Liberal International Order that took shape in 1945 and Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of 1918, were linked by a shared intellectual and political lineage. Both aimed at building a rules-based, cooperative international system that was able to prevent great powers’ conflicts.
In his Stellar Moments of Humanity, Stephan Zweig tells how, after imposing at the Versailles Peace Conference his Fourteen Points, Wilson was incapable of translating the principles therein contained into the second phase of the negotiations. That is, the one that dealt with the specifics of territorial, economic, and military arrangements. As a result, a divorce materialized between the ideal world order envisaged by Wilson, and the real one expressed in those arrangements.
As Henry Kissinger puts it: “The Fourteen Points notwithstanding, the Treaty was punitive in territorial, economic, and military areas”. It was, thus, too “punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering”. (Kissinger, 1994, pp. 239). This, of course, represented the perfect prescription for a future war. As France’s Marshal Foch presciently said: “This is not Peace. It is an Armistice for twenty years”. (Churchill, 2013, p. 6).
Wilson’s League of Nations, proposed in the last of his Fourteen Points, could however have made a difference. But when the country called to be the new hegemon, the United States, decided to turn into isolationism, the League was deprived from its fundamental shouldering.
This was a mistake that the United States did not repeat at the end of World War II, when it became the major force behind the creation of the Liberal International Order (LIO). As such, this order was a materialization of Wilson’s vision, but in a more pragmatic, institutionalized, and U.S.-led form.
It was an order that, although global in its projection, became essential in binding together the Western world and in providing the basis for the deepening transatlantic relations between Anglophone North America and Europe. Overcoming multiple and serious challenges, this order has been able to survive for eight decades.
Revisionism and populism
These last few years, though, a revisionist axis that aims at taking down the LIO has crystalized. Its main protagonists are China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. The essential characteristics of this axis are its illiberal nature and the ambition of its regimes in expanding their countries’ landmass and spheres of influence.
Although a serious threat to the survival of the LIO, this outside menace pales when compared to the one from the inside. Populism within Western societies is indeed the main enemy.
Populist movements strongly reject the LIO. For them, the will of the “people” is transferred to distant cosmopolitan, unelected, and unaccountable elites that tend to constrain what sovereign states can do. Meanwhile, the open markets, free trade, and capital mobility that such an order promotes, are seen as responsible for hollowing out local industries and jobs. International norms on human rights, refuge protection or free movement of people (as in the E.U.), are perceived as a threat to national identity and cultural cohesion.
In that regard, hard-right populism is more encompassing, and by extension harsher in their rejection of the LIO, than left-wing populism. As John Judis puts it: “Leftwing populists champion the people against an elite or an establishment. Theirs is a vertical politics of the bottom and middle arrayed against the top. Rightwing populists champion the people against the elite that they accuse of coddling a third group, which can consist, for instance, of immigrants, Islamists or African American militants. Leftwing populism is dyadic. Rightwing populism is triadic. It looks upward, but also down upon an out group”. (Judis, 2016, p. 14).
This looking down onto certain groups, essentially immigrants, makes the fundamental difference between both kind of populism. While right wing populism makes a strong distinction between the “we versus them”, Bernie Sanders’ populism, by instance, overtly advocates for a “humane immigration reform”. (Sanders, 2017, p. 400).
But in the same manner that there is a distinction between hard-right and left-wing populism, another one exists between European and American populism. The multiplicity of European political parties, in tune with the parliamentary political system of the majority of its countries, allows in Stephen King’s words, for “…parties either to emerge from nowhere or chase electability [emerging] from the political fringes”. (King, 2017, p. 101).
No such option exists for populist parties in the U.S., given its rigid two-party system and the presence of the Electoral College. Populist Ross Perot, even running two of the strongest presidential bids by an outsider in America’s history, could not win a single Electoral vote.
The only chance for populism in America resides within the two-party system. The 2016 Presidential Election was to become a landmark in this regard, as both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump emerged as formidable populist figures within the two-party system.
In 2016, indeed, Donald Trump became the accidental President. Accidental but by no means irrelevant. In a 2019 interview, David Brooks contrasted the past ethos of openness in American politics (trade, international engagement, immigration) with a newer tribal one of closure embodied by Trump. (Brooks, 2019).
MAGA and European hard-right
When Donald Trump won again in 2025, it was clear that populism had attained a real staying power in American politics. MAGA, however, aims at reshaping European populism as well.
“In the months since Mr. Trump took office… administration officials have declared their support for right-wing parties in nearly every country in Europe…seeing them as the best antidote to the liberalism that they regard as a threat”. (Erlanger, 2025).
Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard expand further: “In just six months, the U.S. has shifted from championing liberal democracy to promoting illiberalism and economic protectionism. This revolutionary transformation reaches far beyond the nation’s borders. In that sense, it is not only an American revolution. It is reshaping Europe too…Europe’s far-right forces are…[becoming] the continental vanguard of a transformational revolutionary movement – aligning themselves with Trump’s bid to remake the global order”. (Krastev and Leonard, 2025).
This intent on remaking the global order looks very similar to the illiberal bid embodied by the revisionist axis. In this regard, the oxygen that keeps the LIO alive, is been squeezed out by the combined push of revisionists nations from the front, and hard-right populists from the back.
It would thus seem that the liberal order is living on borrowed time. Not least, because the three European musketeers that are still defending the LIO’s fortress, seem fated to be supplanted by populist governments. Indeed, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Keir Starmer, and Germany’s Friedrich Merz, have powerful populist movements breathing at their back.
With less than eighteen months in office, the first of them will probably be replaced by National Rally’s Jordan Bardella, the most popular political figure in France. A young politician that looks more palatable to many than Marine Le Pen, barred from running.
In Britain, Nigel Farage’s newly created Reform UK is far ahead in the opinion polls. Given the first-past-the-post system in the United Kingdom, this could translate into parliamentary majority. It would seem, indeed, that the Conservative Party is bound to be replaced by Reform UK as the natural alternative to Labour, much in the same manner in which the Labour Party replaced the Liberals as an alternative to the Tories in the 1920s. If so, Reform UK will not only show a forceful staying power, but would most probably replace Labour in government in 2029.
The Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) winning bid in the next parliamentary election is less clear. However, two things are certain. First, the AfD passed from being the fifth-largest party in the Bundestag to becoming number two. Second, the party has shown important electoral gains beyond its traditional stronghold in the east of the country, as exhibited by taking a close second place in the recent local elections in North Rhine-Westphalia (the biggest state in the country).
If hard-right populists conquer government in Europe’s three main countries, in addition to their attained gains all around Europe and MAGA’s impressive strength, the game would be over for the LIO, an order originating with Wilson’s Fourteen Points, that took concrete form in the aftermath of the Second World War. Certainly the LIO needs reforming. Not only because it needs to be adapted to the new realities of the West, but because it never responded to many of the realities of the Global South. However, the world needs a rules-based international order, and crash illiberalism cannot be the answer.
Alfredo Toro Hardy, PhD, is a retired Venezuelan career diplomat, scholar and author. Former Ambassador to the U.S., U.K., Spain, Brazil, Ireland, Chile and Singapore. Author or co-author of thirty-six books on international affairs. Former Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor at Princeton and Brasilia universities. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations and a member of the Review Panel of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center.
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko
References:
Brooks, David (2019). “David Brooks Interviewed by Teddy Kunhardt”, Kunhardt Film Foundation, October 17.
Churchill, Winston (2013). The Gathering Storm. New York: RosettaBooks.
Deudney, Daniel and Ikenberry, G. John (1999), “The nature and sources of liberal international order”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 25, Number 2, April.
Erlanger, Steven (2025). “Some Europeans Fear Trump Aids Want a Far-Right Takeover”, The New York Times, September 20.
Judis, John B. (2016). The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics. New York: Columbia Global Reports.
King, Stephen D. (2017). Grave New World: The End of Globalization and the Return to History. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kissinger, Henry (1994), Diplomacy. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Krastev, Ivan and Leonard, Mark (2025). “Trump’s European revolution”, European Council on Foreign Relations, 23 June.
Sanders, Bernie (2017). Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In. London: Profile Books.
