We stand at the cusp of a reordering moment in international relations as significant as 1989, 1945, or 1919—a generational event. As with these previous episodes, the end of the liberal international order that coalesced in the 1990s is a moment fraught in equal measure with hope and fear, as old certainties both bad and good evaporate. Such pivotal moments are ones where charismatic opportunists rather than competent operators shine.
At each of those previous inflection points, the old order had been going bankrupt slowly, before collapsing all at once. Though it wasn’t always clear to contemporaries, in retrospect we can see that the new order that would succeed in each case had long been in the works. In 1919, for example, the outlawing of war and the establishment of a parliament of nations had been on the table for decades; in 1918, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson had proposed “national self-determination” as the basis of qualification for a state (albeit only for white-led nations). In 1945, the idea of a reformed League of Nations with an effective security council had been planned from 1942 onwards—though the advent of nuclear weapons at the end of the war would change the calculus, ushering in the Cold War. And before 1989, the idea of a universal “liberal” or “rules-based” international order as an alternative to East/West and North/South power struggles had been proposed as far back as the 1970s.
The new post-Cold War hegemony that emerged in the 1990s rested on several normative pillars: (a) that international borders were not to be rewritten by force—defending this postwar norm was the ostensible casus belli for the 1991 Gulf War; (b) that the principle of national sovereignty still applied, unless gross human rights atrocities were being committed—an exception that would eventually be formalized under the rubric of “the responsibility to protect”; (c) that global economic and financial integration should be embraced by all because free and fair trade would benefit all parties; and (d) that disputes among nations would be resolved through legalistic negotiations in multilateral institution—the upgrading of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 being the emblematic institutional manifestation of this principle.
To be sure, none of those pillars went uncontested; hegemony is not the same as consensus. Over the last 15 years, each of them has been challenged in more and more direct terms, especially by Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China. What has put the nail in the coffin is that the United States, which in the 1990s and 2000s claimed to be the greatest champion of these principles, is now rejecting every one. As Nathan Gardels argued a few weeks ago, under the leadership of a reinstalled Donald Trump, the United States is now the world’s leading revisionist power, a claim reiterated recently by Howard French.
Francis Fukuyama appears in Athens on Jan. 27, 2017. Panayotis Tzamaros/ABACAPRESS/Reuters
As the old order lies dying, the central question gripping international relations today is the nature of the new order struggling to be born. Whatever label eventually attaches to this new order, its defining features will include zero-sum transactionalism in international economics, Thucydidean power politics in which “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” and muscular assertions of identitarian politics centered on “civilizational states.” These features will take shape on a much more level international playing field than that obtained after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which Charles Krauthammer famously described as a “unipolar moment” in which the United States appeared, in the words of one-time French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine, as the unique “hyperpower.”
During that last great reordering, the most prominent debate in international relations was between Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” essay (which appeared, prophetically, just months before of the fall of the Wall) and Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations,” published four years later. Fukuyama himself acknowledged that “the end of history” was “not a statement about the empirical condition of the world, but a normative argument concerning the justice or adequacy of liberal democratic political institutions.” But liberals at the time felt that Fukuyama’s normative vision was worthy of support. And by the turn of the century, liberals could squint at reforms in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia and Jiang Zemin’s China and convince themselves that Fukuyama had won the argument on points as well as style.
Huntington disagreed. Like Fukuyama, Huntington—a co-founder of Foreign Policy—argued that the Cold War divisions between the communist East and the democratic West, between the rich global north and the poor global south were “no longer relevant.” But where the liberal internationalist Fukuyama anticipated that the end of the Cold War presaged perpetual peace among states all aligned on the general principles of electoral democracy and managed capitalism (what Fukuyama called “the final form of human government”), the realist Huntington instead foresaw a world marked by continued conflict, albeit along entirely different axes.
For Huntington, the critical geopolitical actors were now “civilizations” understood in the terms defined by the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee in A Study of History, published in 12 volumes between 1934 and 1961. For Huntington, the “fault lines” (notice the ominously tectonic metaphor) between civilizations would be the sites of rupture in the post-Cold War order:
Civilization identity will be increasingly important in the future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization. The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another.
Huntington’s vision of the new order was decidedly darker than Fukuyama’s, though both were ambivalent. Fukuyama famously finished his essay by arguing that the price of perpetual peace would be technocratic tedium, in which the “daring, courage, imagination, and idealism” of ideological struggle would give way to mere “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” For Fukuyama, the forthcoming “centuries of boredom” would create an existential crisis for individuals seeking social recognition in a world bereft of opportunities for political glory.
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By contrast, Huntington argued that group identities, based on invidious cultural distinctions, were enduring and would only become more obvious as the universalizing ideologies of the Cold War waned. In the 1996 book that expanded the argument of his original article, he foresaw an equivocal equilibrium based on “core states” enforcing their dominance within their own civilizational “spheres of influence.” On the one hand, “clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace” in that an emphasis on ineluctable cultural difference formed the basis for never-ending hostility. (Huntington also anticipated that hostility to immigrants would be the defining feature of domestic politics in a world order defined by the clash of civilizations.)
On the other hand, so long as everyone in the new order recognized the folly of trying to impose their own cultural system on “alien” civilizations, “an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war.” Cultural hostility between civilizations might be inevitable, but with good fortune, the “clash” might consist merely of noisy clanking, rather than violent conflict.
Compared to Fukuyama, Huntington’s essay and subsequent book, if anything, received even more attention—much of it in a more critical tone. Historians and anthropologists criticized the incoherence of the category of civilization (which Huntington himself admitted was fluid), while international relations scholars noted that many of the most intense conflicts of the era—such as vicious wars between Sunni and Shia Muslims, as well as across Africa—were taking placewithin civilizations, not between them. Cosmopolitans, globalists, and liberals hated the book less for its analysis of political dynamics than its unabashed amoralism.
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Anatole Nsengiyumva sits with his hands in a prayer formation as he is guarded in court. - Former Rwandan army commander Anatole Nsengiyumva sits in court as he waits for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to hand down a verdict on charges of genocide on Dec. 18, 2008. Tony Karumba/AFP via Getty Images
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A woman in a headscarf gestures as she talks in a crowd to a camera crew, not pictured. - A relative of a Bosnian genocide victim reacts during a live TV broadcast from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia near Srebrenica on Nov. 22, 2017, after U.N. judges announced a life sentence for former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic. Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images
For the first couple of decades after the end of the Cold War, the international order operated mostly within Fukuyama’s normative frame. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s, political leaders of nations for the most part, however grudgingly, played according the “liberal international” rules. Europe pushed to integrate itself under the administrative structures of the European Union. Trade disputes went to the WTO, and its rulings were generally respected. War criminals were pursued unevenly, but when apprehended they found themselves hauled before official international legal tribunals, be that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (established in 1993), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (established in 1994), or the International Criminal Court (established in 2002).
When the United States decided to wage war—as it did in the Balkans in the 1990s, Iraq in 2003, and Libya in 2011—it sought the legal approbation of some international entity, be that the United Nations or NATO (though it would not allow a no vote to deter it). Indeed, George W. Bush went out of his way repeatedly to insist that the global war on terror and regime change in Iraq were being prosecuted on Fukuyaman rather than Huntingtonian terms: “When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations,” he intoned. “The requirements of freedom apply fully to Africa and Latin America and the entire Islamic world. The peoples of the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation. And their governments should listen to their hopes.”
Even Russia, the biggest geopolitical loser in the post-Cold War settlement, and thus unsurprisingly its most vocal great power dissenter, showed deference to the new order by attempting only de facto—and not de jure—annexations of the various slices of its neighbors it lopped off (Transnistria from Moldova after 1992, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia after 2008). Each of these instances may have represented the tribute that vice pays to virtue, but they were tribute nonetheless.
A man waves a Russian flag in the center of the Crimean city of Sevastopol on March 21, 2014, after Russian lawmakers voted to annex Crimea, in defiance of the international community’s insistence that the peninsula is part of Ukraine. VIKTOR DRACHEV/AFP/Getty Images
To be Fukuyaman (which is to say Hegelian) about the matter, every era contains the seeds of its successor—the latter in the form of oppositional forces to the dominant order. By the beginning of the 2010s, the cracks in the post-historical normative architecture were beginning to show. Increasingly, emerging powers identifying themselves in the civilizational terms that Huntington had described two decades earlier began to dissent openly from the allegedly universal values underpinning the liberal international order. While in the 1990s leaders of some smaller countries like Singapore and Malaysia had promoted the idea of “Asian values” (as distinct from Western ones), by 2014, both Putin and Xi were openly describing Russia and China as “civilizations” with distinct values incommensurate with (and, from their perspective, better than) those of the Western democracies.
With a decade of hindsight, 2014 now appears to have been the pivotal year when the rot in the liberal international order began to turn gangrenous. Russia’s de jure annexation of the Crimean peninsula that year represented an explicit rupture, a facial rejection of one of the key pillars of the liberal international order, namely that borders are not to be rewritten by force. Tellingly, Putin justified his move on explicitly “civilizational” grounds, arguing that Crimea had always been part of “the Russian world.” Likewise, Narendra Modi and the BJP’s displacement of the pluralist Congress Party in 2014 was couched in terms of the ideology of Hindutva, which presented India as a civilizational state based on the Hindu religion (never mind the hundreds of millions non-Hindu Indians). And the emergence in Xi as a top leader uninterested in strategic ambiguity about China’s likely liberalization and increasingly interested in direct ideological confrontation spelled the end of Fukuyama’s utopian vision. By the mid-aughts, democratization’s “third wave” looked more like a false flag than the flourish of the future.
From this perspective, last quarter century reads as a long incubation of the Huntingtonian prediction. It is now apparent that Huntington was not so much wrong about the contours of the emerging post-Cold War order as he was premature in his intuitions. He put his finger on the antinomian element which would fester inside that order, waiting for its moment to emerge as the basis for the next order—that is, the one that has been emerging into full cry over the last decade.
Seen from the high point of liberal internationalist optimism of the late 1990s, our present moment is thus best seen as “the revenge of Huntington”: The dream of a universal consensus in favor of liberal democracy and technocratically managed global capitalism is dead, and the civilizational clashers are ascendent almost everywhere, from Moscow and Beijing to Delhi and Istanbul—and of course now in Washington, D.C. Within this new order, fortune will focus on (though perhaps not favor) the bold and assertive over the polite and orderly. Instead of suffering the aseptic boredom of post-historical bureaucratic rules, we will enjoy the sanguinary excitements of an international system red in tooth and claw. Ruthlessness will be rewarded, toothlessness will be exploited. I expect Huntington is smiling from the grave.