Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order

The underlying trends propelling multipolarity have been there for decades. The last three administrations, Bush, Obama and Trump, have speeded up the exit from hegemony.The withering of the liberal order may be followed by a more complex one, where regional powers carve spheres of influence and transact with larger ones according to mutual benefit.I will miss the liberal order since America has represented mankind's hope for many years.

Cooley and Nexon ask what makes an international order. They argue that a successful order rests on the leading state’s ability to maintain the infrastructure and defend the international ecosystem that underpin it. They demonstrate that the US has recruited many powers into the liberal order but has failed or been unable to check the erosion and challenges led by Russia and China. Trump has gravely accelerated the order’s demise. Lucid and well-written, it’s the guide you need to US and world politics.

The United States is generally believed to have committed to a liberal international order in which three elements are prominent. First and foremost, it practices political liberal governance and establishes the responsibility for governments to protect some minimal set of individual rights for their citizens. On the other hand, there is a belief in, and commitment to, encouraging free and open economic exchange and flows among states in the name of economic liberalism. Lastly, relations among states are governed by the principle of liberal intergovernmentalism. State behavior is regulated by multilateral treaties and agreements, international organizations, and institutions that make rules and norms, monitor compliance with those rules and norms, resolve disputes, and provide for public goods among members.However, according to the author, ‘What we can say with greater confidence is that the United States will no longer be able to exercise global hegemony, and that it will need to accommodate other powers to a much greater extent than it is used to.’ (P.200) In other words, the American-led international order is unravelling. It results from a general power transition away from the United States. During such transitions, the leading power or hegemon faces increasing difficulties in maintaining its preferred international order; its relative decline encourages other states unhappy with that order to seek to renegotiate terms, build alternative arrangements of one kind or another, probe for weaknesses, and even directly challenge the dominant power or its allies. In the worst-case scenario, the system collapses into a devastating great-power war.Generally speaking, there are two broad approaches to challenging an international order. By way of order contestation, great powers, weaker states and non-state actors can try to contest aspects of international architecture (systemic rules, norms and values) from within existing infrastructure (the practices, institutions, relationships, flows and routine interactions in the system). Also, they can try alternative-order building by constructing alternative infrastructures that embed their preferred rules, norms and values. For the purpose of contestation, challengers usually indulge in acts of wedging and brokering. Wedging involves trying to break apart existing relationships, while brokering involves trying to create new relationships by linking together different individuals, groups, and organizations.What is the future of American global leadership? It is pretty clear that regimes from around the world are unlikely, for better or for worse, to simply accept the kind of liberal ordering that the United States promoted in the 1990s and 2000s. Analysts often use terms like ‘multipolar’ and ‘post-Western’ to speculate the contours of international order in the absence of American global leadership. However, such assertions are problematic ‘because they often fail to adequately disentangle unipolarity, the American hegemonic system, and broader international order.’ (P.189) The author reminds us once more that ‘regardless of the contours of this new order, the United States will continue to be the most consequential single actor for years, and possibly even decades to come.’ (P.201)