The crisis of the conservative international order

Abstract

The crisis of the liberal international order (LIO) is the dominant narrative of our time. It pervades scholarship, journalism and policy discussion, influencing the ways we see contemporary global tensions, future possibilities and political choices. This article argues that the current crisis is not simply a crisis of the LIO, but of the CIO—the conservative international order. The postwar order was not constructed by liberals alone. It was also built by conservative governments, politicians and intellectuals who were crucial parts of the domestic and international accommodations and alliances underpinning the postwar order. Today's crisis is to a large degree the result of the implosion that has transformed conservatism from a supporter of the LIO to one of its most powerful opponents. While this article focuses on the United States, the implications of the crisis of the CIO extend beyond America and require a fundamental rethinking of the conventional International Relations view of liberalism and the development of the LIO. The influence of the anti-liberal forces in American conservatism is supported by their transnational connections, allowing for powerful alliances that undermine mainstream conservatism and its historical support for the LIO. The crisis of the CIO, in short, is global.

The crisis of the liberal international order (LIO) is the dominant narrative of our time. It pervades scholarship, journalism and policy discussion, influencing the ways we see contemporary global tensions, future possibilities and political choices.¹ In this narrative, the system of international organizations, free markets and human rights was a liberal achievement, reflecting the ideas and actions of liberal powers and policy-makers.² The postwar period was a time when liberal values and institutions provided the foundations of a relatively stable and prosperous—if unequal and often violent—international order. Yet now, or so this narrative continues, we confront a ‘crisis’ of that order, with liberal principles and institutions under potentially mortal threat from a combination of national populism domestically and illiberal powers internationally. John Ikenberry, this view's pre-eminent theorist, has summarized it as follows:

For seven decades the world has been dominated by a western liberal order. After the Second World War, the United States and its partners built a multifaceted and sprawling international order, organized around economic openness, multilateral institutions, security cooperation and democratic solidarity … Today, this liberal international order is in crisis.³

As its remarkable prominence indicates, this narrative undoubtedly captures key elements of the postwar order and its present challenges.⁴ But what if the terms of these debates are at least partly misleading? What if, rather than clarifying the situation we confront, seeing the situation as the crisis of the liberal international order blinds us to crucial aspects of how that order was actually constructed and the challenges it faces today? This article argues that the current crisis is not simply a crisis of the LIO, but also of the CIO—the conservative international order. To put the claim bluntly: the postwar order was not constructed by liberals alone. It was also built by conservative governments, politicians and intellectuals that were key parts of the ‘diverse array of constituencies and stakeholders’⁵—the domestic and international accommodations, coalitions and alliances that underpinned the creation and maintenance of the postwar order. In fact, today's crisis is to a large degree the result of the implosion that has transformed conservatism from a supporter of the LIO to one of its most powerful opponents.

To unravel this situation, the article proceeds in three parts. The first section examines the key question of what we mean by liberalism, developing an understanding of liberalism not as a set of transhistorical principles stretching from the eighteenth or nineteenth century through to the present, but as a semantic field in which different conceptual elements are brought together by diverse actors and interests at different points in time. This provides the basis for a clearer understanding of the ideological underpinnings of the postwar order, which were marked by the ascent of a novel and powerful conservative Cold War liberalism and the parallel dominance of moderate, liberal conservatism. The relationship between these two ideological positions in turn provided the tension-filled yet durable foundation of what we have come to call the LIO—a foundation in which conservative positions were crucial.

This ideological reconfiguration between liberalism and conservatism dominated the landscape of postwar politics in the ‘core’ countries of the LIO, forming the basis of the international order. In the second section, I trace its evolution in the ‘leading state’ of the order, the United States.⁶ The embedded liberalism of the American-led postwar era was not an exclusively liberal project, if by that we mean that it was carried out primarily by self-identified liberals in line with a transhistorical set of liberal principles. It was, instead, the product of a conservative-inflected Cold War liberalism and successive forms of conservatism over two historical phases: an early period dominated by liberal ‘modern conservatism’ that explicitly accepted and adopted key liberal principles domestically and internationally, and, from the early 1960s, a much more ‘ideological’ conservatism that, while more explicitly anti-liberal in domestic politics, was on the whole still largely supportive of the principles of the LIO on the international stage. This ‘fusionist’ ideological formation continued to provide such support until and after the end of the Cold War. The crisis of the LIO today arises from the erosion of conservative support for the system it helped to create as latent tensions within American conservatism widened after the end of the Cold War, giving rise to explicitly anti-liberal positions hostile to the LIO both domestically and internationally.

The implications of these shifts for US foreign policy are potentially profound. The final section of this article discusses how they also have consequences well beyond America. In Europe, for example, conservative Christian Democrats played key roles in constructing the ‘quiet bulwark’⁷ of the LIO, forging an accommodation with liberalism under the banner of a wider ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’⁸ and marginalizing radical conservative movements. This accommodation is also under severe strain today, with radical conservative forces in the United States and Europe making common cause in attacking it. Similarly, while the postwar order was largely made in the West, it was also shaped by forces in the global South and former colonies: today, these states are not just affected by the crisis, but are playing a role in it. Across the global South, actors hostile to or dissatisfied with the LIO are gaining new confidence and opportunities, finding allies in the North while also being encouraged by Russia and China.⁹

The global impact of anti-liberal forces in American conservatism is intensified by the fact that these movements are transnational as well as national. Ideas, individuals and even institutional support flow across borders,¹⁰ and American radical conservatives engage in ideological collaboration with a wide range of global actors. The contexts and agendas of these movements are diverse, and their influences and interactions run in multiple directions. But all explicitly target the institutions and values of the LIO and reject mainstream forms of conservatism that supported it in the past.¹¹ In short, the crisis of the CIO in its American core is part of wider political struggles and has global implications.

Postwar liberalism

Concepts matter. The concepts we use to frame a situation bring with them assumptions about how the world works, how it is changing and the responses that are necessary and realistic. In arguments about the LIO, a great deal depends on what is meant by liberalism—and as everyone knows, defining this term is no easy task.¹² Indeed, the methodological and historical challenges of theorizing liberalism have generated literatures so extensive that they risk making any attempt to define so protean a term quixotic. Thankfully, Duncan Bell has provided an influential and insightful way of managing this problem. Instead of trying to find the essential meaning or conceptual core of liberalism across the centuries, he suggests adopting a contextualist approach focusing on the ways the concept is defined and used among an identifiable set of actors with different perspectives and interests in specific ‘semantic fields’ and historical settings.¹³

This perspective provides important insights for unravelling the relationship between postwar liberalism and theories of the LIO. For example, Bell demonstrates that the ‘Lockean tradition’ frequently invoked as a foundation of the centuries-long evolution of the LIO is deeply questionable. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, John Locke (1632–1704) remained a marginal figure in political–ideological discourse, and the ‘Lockean tradition’ rose to prominence only in the mid-1930s as a key ideological plank in opposition to authoritarianism. This use intensified in the postwar era as a wider and more diffuse narrative of a centuries-old ‘liberal tradition’ formed the basis of a ‘western civilization’ that needed to be defended from foundational ideological and geopolitical challenges from both the left and the right.¹⁴

Two important conclusions follow from this argument. First, while it is commonplace to note that ‘from a historical perspective, the LIO of the 1950s has different features than the LIO of the 2010s’, these differences are rarely explored in depth, and often sit side by side with invocations of a putative liberal tradition stretching from Locke and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) up to the present.¹⁵ In reality, mid-century liberalism was constituted as much by its invention of this tradition as by any unbroken lineage of which it was simply the latest expression. During its intense confrontation with ‘totalitarianism’¹⁶ between the 1930s and the 1950s, liberalism moved from a diffuse and frequently ignored concept or tradition of thought to the centre of political discourse and geopolitical struggle. In this period, particularly through its rearticulation as ‘liberal democracy’, liberalism was reinscribed ‘as either the most authentic ideological tradition of the West (a pre-1945 storyline) or its constitutive ideology (a view popular after 1945)’. Theoretically and rhetorically stretched, liberalism was ‘retrojected’ onto a past where it became ‘the “secular form of Western civilization” and the “modern embodiment of all the characteristic traditions of western politics”’, supporting claims that ‘“political liberalism has been deeply implicated in the whole development of western culture”’.¹⁷

This new semantic field accommodated thinkers and actors from a range of political positions, including conservatives. All could agree that, despite their differences, they shared in and wanted to defend the liberal, western or Judeo-Christian¹⁸ tradition that constituted the genius (and the ideology) of postwar Atlantic ‘liberal democratic’ culture. As Bell nicely summarizes the situation:

Conjoining ‘liberal’ to democracy automatically (and vastly) expanded the scope of those purportedly encompassed by liberalism, as supporters of ‘liberal democracy’ were conscripted, however reluctantly, to the liberal tradition. Liberalism was thus transfigured from a term identifying a limited and contested position within political discourse to either the most authentic expression of the Western tradition or a constitutive feature of the West itself.¹⁹

Second, this understanding of liberalism provides a basis for understanding a key ideological dimension of postwar politics in the West: Cold War liberalism. The liberalism of the postwar era was distant from both that of the nineteenth century and the progressive Wilsonianism of the early twentieth.²⁰ Postwar liberalism was not just more ‘world-weary’ because of its confrontation with the ‘dark side’ of modernity;²¹ it was also more conservative. Developing themes articulated by Judith Shklar²² in the 1950s, Samuel Moyn has recently argued that postwar liberalism was characterized above all by how it took on ‘the guise of its old conservative adversary’.²³ Moyn's generalizations can be contested,²⁴ but his observation is far from unique. Eric Goldman observed in 1956 that the liberalism of the late 1940s gradually ‘turned into a form of conservatism’.²⁵ Three decades later, Richard Pells noted in a similar vein how during the 1950s many liberals had sought to ‘become authentically conservative’, in part to combat ‘the “pseudo-conservatism” of the McCarthyites’.²⁶ while the American conservative Sam Francis held that in the post-war era

liberal intellectuals—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Reinhold Niebuhr, most prominently—began to reformulate liberalism in a way that muted the radical, progressivist, egalitarian, and utopian premises of the Progressive Era and to talk about ‘original sin’, the inherent irrationality of human nature, and the limitations of political solutions to intractable problems of the human condition.²⁷

Whether historians find this ideological shift a weakness or a strength, it is difficult to dispute Cold War liberalism's distinctiveness—much of which lay in its uneasy entanglement with conservatism.²⁸

The concrete implications of these shifts were seen in Cold War liberalism's strong anti-communism; its support for incrementalist social policies and its caution towards expanding the domestic power of government; its commitment to natural rights or other principles foregrounding the autonomy of the individual; its belief in the (at least instrumental) value of religion and tradition in maintaining social order; and its qualified support for the use of force to maintain international order in the face of revolutionary change. None of these views were narrowly conservative, still less reactionary, and there was considerable disagreement among Cold War liberals on philosophic as well as policy issues. But many had a distinctly conservative cast, and even those that did not retained respect for certain forms of conservative thought.²⁹ Strategic containment within a liberal realist vision of world politics; fighting the ‘cultural Cold War’ at home and abroad in the name of the ‘vital centre’ and western values; and a commitment to free—albeit managed—markets were hallmarks of Cold War liberalism, distinguishing it in important ways from previous forms. They also made it possible for many postwar conservatives to find common cause with Cold War liberals as part of the dominant semantic field of the era. It is to these shifts in conservatism that this article turns next.

Postwar conservatism

The ‘discursive “fusion”’³⁰ of liberalism and conservatism that constituted the semantic field of the Cold War LIO was not the achievement of self-identified liberals alone, nor did it occur in a political vacuum. Crucial to its formation were parallel movements that made postwar conservatism more amenable to this redefined liberalism and support for the LIO. Indeed, as the historian Alan Brinkley commented, during much of the postwar era the dominant form of American conservatism ‘rested on a philosophical foundation not readily distinguishable from the liberal tradition, to which it is, in theory, opposed’,³¹ an observation that reflects the ideological constellation underpinning the postwar liberal order.

In the early postwar era, American conservatism—including its attitudes towards world affairs—was a complex affair that defies easy summary. Yet from at least the early 1950s the American right was strongly influenced by moderate positions that provided important support for the emerging order. These positions were personified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower's strong internationalism and qualified acceptance of New Deal liberalism as part of his ‘Modern Republicanism’. As Eisenhower memorably put it, he was committed to ‘build[ing] up a strong, progressive Republican Party in the country … If the right wing wants a fight, they are going to get it’.³² As the president's stance demonstrates, this liberal conservatism was far from uncontested. From the start, it confronted competitors on the right who dismissed its ‘me, too-ism’ and its compromises with liberalism. Among a range of stances, these included libertarians who rejected the welfare state and all it stood for; mid-western and other conservatives who cleaved to a modified version of classical free-market liberalism dubbed ‘conservativism’ in response to liberalism's increasingly progressive cast;³³ southern segregationists, who asserted the racial hierarchies and ‘distinct culture’ of the South against the North (and the federal government); as well as conspiratorial anti-communists, who populated the John Birch Society (founded in 1958 during Eisenhower's second term) and a range of other positions on what came to be called the ‘radical right’.³⁴

These movements had adherents and energy. But by the mid-1950s, many conservatives also sceptical of compromises with liberalism worried that anti-moderate forces risked condemning the right to the intellectual and electoral margins. In response, figures such as Peter Viereck, Richard Weaver and Russell Kirk³⁵ sought to rediscover (or create) conservative traditions distanced from nativism, racism and reaction—positions that more effectively engaged with liberal modernity without being just an ‘echo’ of it.³⁶ This project was advanced most prominently by William F. Buckley and figures associated with the magazine he founded, the National Review. At its centre was ‘fusionism’. Fusionism held that if disarray and radicalism persisted within the ranks of the anti-liberal right, American conservatism would watch impotently as the progressive liberal state expanded almost unchecked, with the connivance of its moderate conservative allies. In response, Buckley and his supporters pursued a process of inclusion and exclusion designed to build an ideological and political coalition capable of bringing a revised conservatism to power.

Fusionism sought to bring together three parts of the anti-liberal conservative movement: free marketeers, social traditionalists and anti-communists. The latter group was beyond doubt the strongest glue holding this ideological alliance together, providing a strong anti-isolationist backbone to the movement. But fusionism also succeeded in getting important parts of the libertarian right to moderate their opposition to a role for government in the economy and social policy, and convincing disparate faith groups, predominantly Protestants and Catholics, that their shared commitment to inviolable principles and ‘western civilization’ outweighed their doctrinal differences. Further, it convinced all three that failure to come together would ensure the continued hegemony of liberal progressivism and failure in the Cold War.

This process of inclusion inescapably involved exclusion—what two right-wing critics, Richard Spencer and Paul Gottfried, have called ‘the great purge’.³⁷ Indeed, the second objective of the fusionist project was to exclude those unwilling to conform: to marginalize and destroy the remnants of the old, nativist–nationalist and often isolationist right. Once these views had been purged, conservatism could accommodate a range of positions and even appeal to conservative liberals, expanding the constituency of the fusionist right—a strategy that by the 1970s put fusionism at the centre of conservatism and its electoral successes.³⁸

Fusionism strongly opposed many progressive liberal domestic policies. However, it is vital to note that it largely supported the LIO. Marginalization of the radical right excluded most of the strategic isolationists, economic protectionists, cultural nationalists and reactionary racists opposed to the LIO. By contrast, free trade within an (albeit reduced) interventionist state policy and strong (often virulent) anti-communism were among fusionism's hallmarks, together with commitment to the values of ‘western civilization’ and belief in the importance of transcendent or universal values and individual autonomy. Although fusionist conservatives differed from Cold War liberals on the specifics of these general principles, they continued to operate at the international level within the same semantic field—a field fundamentally supportive of the LIO.

The persistence of this field and conservatism's place within it can be observed through the rise of the ‘neo-conservatives’ who exercised such influence in foreign policy in the years before and after 2000. As one admirer put it:

By exiling anti-Semites, Birchers, and anti-American reactionaries from its pages, [Buckley's National Review] determined which conservative arguments were legitimate and which were not … Buckley did more than exorcise demons. He welcomed converts. When a group of anti-Communist liberals began to drift from the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Buckley and company lowered the drawbridge and welcomed the neoconservatives to the castle. ‘Come on in’, National Review editorialized, ‘the water's fine’.³⁹

This was an unstable alliance, incorporating neo-liberal and socially conservative elements always susceptible to following different trajectories, and containing forces that would later pull conservatism in quite divergent directions. But in marginalizing views they regarded as economically regressive, politically unviable and socially reactionary, conservatism in this period operated within a set of assumptions, ideas and languages—a semantic and political field—that was broadly supportive of the LIO.

Fusionism—from both sides

The simultaneous shifts within Cold War liberalism and fusionist conservatism produced what we might call a dual fusionism and extensive ideological, electoral and institutional support for the LIO. Self-identified liberals and conservatives, and the Democratic and Republican parties, were often at odds in quotidian political contestation. However, this contestation took place within a recognizably common framework in which the LIO, its principles and its strategies could be fought over and accommodation reached, or at least where roughly common foundations could be acknowledged.⁴⁰

Four dimensions of this dual fusion are particularly notable. First, religious traditionalists, libertarians and ‘chastened’ Cold War liberals concurred on the importance of fundamental natural or human rights, even if they disagreed on their foundations and implications. For many Cold War liberals, the principle of the ultimate value of the individual and the need to protect it against the excesses of liberal and progressive politics, as well as totalitarianism, was the greatest lesson of the 1930s and 1940s. In some, this took an existentialist turn; in others, forms of natural right prevailed.⁴¹ But all rejected the optimistic rationalism or relativism they associated with earlier forms of liberalism.

These shifts brought Cold War liberalism into quite close relation with conservatism, where attacks on liberalism's subjectivism and relativism had long been commonplace. Here, alternatives such as Jacques Maritain's ‘personalism’⁴² and varieties of natural law circulated amid an array of religious and philosophical responses to the disasters of the first half of the century. Distancing themselves from chauvinist nationalism and religious sectarianism, these thinkers were often fervent supporters of the universal value of the individual. Indeed, as Moyn has argued, despite their frequent association with liberalism (and the LIO) ‘human rights need to be closely linked, in their beginnings, to an epoch-making reinvention of conservatism’.⁴³ In loosening their moorings in more rigidly communal or sectarian foundations, these ideas of the sanctity of the individual became more amenable to Cold War liberalism, and vice versa.⁴⁴ For both, the Soviet Union, like Nazi Germany, was dangerous: not just because it was a great power, but because it was another expression of modernity's denial of the value of individuals in the name of purportedly higher values attached to class, nation or history. As a result, the LIO's characteristic stress on individual rights found widespread support across the political spectrum, however diverse the philosophical foundations and policy recommendations of those commitments might have been.

Second, both moderate conservatives and Cold War liberals saw democracy as valuable but fragile. Cold War liberals viewed democracy as easily destroyed by popular enthusiasm and mass politics, which they saw as potentially as great a threat as invasion or reactionary overthrow. Democracy depended on strong institutions insulated from popular pressures, a ‘militant’⁴⁵ attitude willing to defend its principles against competing ideologies and liberal relativism, and a civic culture of discipline, restraint and wariness.⁴⁶ Institutions insulated from majority control were vital bulwarks against the excesses of democratic politics, as were civic cultures promulgating values that fitted with wider narratives about the foundational importance of western (liberal) civilization.

Views differed between liberals and moderate conservatives on exactly what this meant. Most liberals retained a faith in the potential or actual virtues of modern publics, opposed the concentration of power in the hands of economic elites and believed that liberalism had tools that could help offset the dangers of mass democracy. Modernist aesthetics, for example, were mobilized to show the superiority of liberal cultures of individuality to totalitarian conformism and narrowly national cultures.⁴⁷ But Cold War liberals maintained a scepticism towards democracy that set them apart from their progressive liberal predecessors.

These themes resonated with moderate conservatives who, having seemingly vanquished reaction from their ranks, saw little to disagree with in broad terms. After all, the importance of institutions and culture, together with suspicion towards mass democracy, were longstanding cornerstones of conservative thought and politics. Conservatives disagreed with Cold War liberals over the types of institutional structures and the civic and artistic cultures necessary to defend western civilization. However, neither held the faith in individualism and rationality that they (sometimes self-servingly) attributed to the liberalism of prior generations. Both vehemently rejected the national cultures they associated with fascism and the destructive teleology of communism, and both saw culture and aesthetics as crucial battlegrounds where geopolitical struggles for individuality and liberal democracy were fought.

A third aspect of this semantic field involved political economy. For fusionist conservatives, a viable market society had to be protected from both the collectivist left and the protectionists and radical libertarians on the right. The forms and degrees of economic regulation and intervention, as well as participation in international agreements, were constantly contested among conservatives and between conservatives and liberals, but both agreed on the importance of market mechanisms and a stable global economic system facilitated by international institutions—and these struggles took place within widely accepted limits and exclusions on the left and the right that underpinned ‘embedded’ liberalism.⁴⁸ Fusionist conservatives and Cold War liberals could also combine in asserting the rights of capital and international property rights in the face of socialist and anti-colonial calls for appropriation, joining together in opposing proposals such as the New International Economic Order.⁴⁹

Overlaying all of this, of course, was anti-communism. The strong anti-communism of Cold War liberals such as Niebuhr and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, has been widely noted, and they had no shortage of allies among liberals and conservatives alike. This key axis of Cold War politics depended on the marginalization of both the socialist and communist left and the radical right. In terms of the latter, vanquishing ‘America Firsters’,⁵⁰ as well as advocates of ‘rollback’ and ‘liberation’ in central and eastern Europe and of international conspiracy theories, were prerequisites for the dominant postwar consensus concerning the United States' global role and its involvement in international security organizations—another key pillar supporting the LIO.

In sum, ‘embedding’ liberalism across each of these four areas was not an exclusively liberal project, if by that we mean that it was carried out primarily by self-identified liberals in line with a transhistorical set of liberal principles. The ‘liberal’ international order was the product of conservative-inflected Cold War liberalism and fusionist conservatism. Accommodations within it were always combinations of circumstance, conviction, convenience and conflict, but they provided degrees of cross-ideological and cross-issue embedding that supported the order across time. This support was strongest under the sway of ‘modern’ conservatism from the early 1950s up to the early 1960s, and persisted under fusionist conservatism from the mid-1960s up to the 1980s. However, it continued to be powerful even after 1989. Perhaps the best example of this continuity is neo-conservatism.

As the label indicates, the ‘neo-cons’ were hardly traditional conservatives. Many were hawkish Cold War liberals with a range of conservative leanings: former Democrats who viewed their movement towards the Republican Party as being forced upon them by an increasingly progressive Democratic left. In their eyes, by the late 1960s both the liberal left and many conservatives had lost sight of the principles of the early Cold War consensus. Neo-conservatism saw and represented itself as an updated version of those earlier commitments to universal rights, forceful anti-communism, traditional cultural values and, more controversially, democracy promotion. It was not always or intrinsically opposed to multilateral institutions—although it was hostile towards institutions that it saw as failing to advance these goals or limiting the sway of American power, which it viewed as almost synonymous with those goals. Nonetheless, the bitter disputes that accompanied the rise and fall of the neo-conservatives were very much a battle within the semantic field produced by postwar liberalism and conservatism, not a fundamental challenge to it. Today, although echoes of that fusion exist on the right, they have eroded to the point where little seems to remain. The challenges are now foundational.

Fission

The difficulty with seeing the postwar international order as ‘liberal’ is not just that it underestimates the importance of conservatism in its formation and operation. It also blinds us to specific challenges that the order faces today, many of which arise from the explicit rejection of postwar conservatism on the right.⁵¹ This fission can be traced across each of the areas surveyed above: questions of foundational values; the relationship between liberalism and democracy; the appropriate structure of international economic relations; and the geopolitics of the West.

As we have seen, questions of ‘the human’, religion and the existential ‘crisis of man’ cut across liberalism and conservatism in Cold War culture. The search for meaning and the imperative of securing the individual against modernity's dehumanizing forces were widely shared, as was commitment to the value and dignity of the individual, and the importance of attacking totalitarian answers to it on the left and right. This consensus was always filled with tensions, but it dissipated with the end of the Cold War, setting loose a new (or revived) radicalism in conservatism. This shift could not be more clearly expressed than in a joint statement written in 2019 by prominent US conservatives, tellingly entitled ‘Against the dead consensus’, which declares:

We give credit where it is due: Consensus conservatism played a heroic role in defeating Communism in the last century, by promoting prosperity at home and the expansion of a rules-based international order. At its best, the old consensus defended the natural rights of Americans and the ‘transcendent dignity of the human person, as the visible image of the invisible God’ (Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus) against the depredations of totalitarian regimes.

But even during the Cold War, this conservatism too often tracked the same lodestar liberalism did—namely, individual autonomy. The fetishizing of autonomy paradoxically yielded the very tyranny that consensus conservatives claim most to detest.⁵²

The unifying position here is that the autonomous liberal subject is not the salvation of modernity, but one of its greatest dangers. In these visions, the crisis of the LIO results from a confluence of liberal anomie and progressive repression long predating 1989. For anti-modernists and post-liberals focused on fundamental values, the roots of the crisis date to at least the end of the nineteenth century, when progressive or new liberalism replaced classical forms. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s these critiques stressed the iconoclasm and relativism they associated with the late 1960s, when hedonism and subjectivism swept away as repressive the restraint and discipline prized by conservatives and Cold War liberals. More recently, they have turned to how liberalism's focus on continual reinvention of the individual, society and morals is connected to the accumulation of cultural and legal power in the hands of the New Class. In this telling, liberal experts and managerial elites engage constantly in progressive social engineering projects to reconfigure individual and collective life, and spread illiberal ‘wokeism’ that seeks to enforce conformity with progressive values via interpersonal sanctions, international legal institutions and non-governmental organizations.⁵³

Conventional conservatives stand accused of complicity with this liberal system, paying lip service to traditional values and institutions while themselves being party to the commodification of individuals and cultures, and participating in weakening traditional social bonds and national allegiances. As Yoram Hazony, the most prominent popularizer of ‘national conservatism’, has put it,

To the extent that Anglo-American conservatism has become confused with liberalism, it has, for just this reason, become incapable of conserving anything at all. Indeed, in our day, conservatives have largely become bystanders, gaping in astonishment as the consuming fire of cultural revolution destroys everything in its path.⁵⁴

The aggressive reassertion of cultural identity and particularity by many conservatives today is part of this reaction. Attacks on ‘identity politics’ are another, with liberal assertions about the malleability of identities derided as assaults on the ‘human’ in new and insidious forms. The ‘progressive social values’ that Ikenberry sees as underpinning liberalism⁵⁵ are reconfigured in contemporary conservatism as the sin of progressivism: the idea that progress should sweep away traditional values and institutions and replace them with solutions devised by technocratic experts. The radicalization of cultural conflicts follows logically, tearing apart the postwar consensus on the right and its role in constructing the postwar LIO.

These arguments are by no means new. They can be found in the discourse of conservative thinkers going back well over a century. What is new is their urgency, popularity and overt hostility towards consensus conservatism and compromises with liberalism. They represent a reaction against exactly the kinds of conservatism that helped construct the postwar LIO. This is often allied to an attack on liberal human rights universalism. Whereas the postwar consensus generally embraced a view of individuality that even nationalist conservatives could endorse to different degrees, today's human rights discourses are presented as attempts to enforce conformity with contemporary progressive values, destroying the integrity of the person and empowering progressive legal and normative attacks on traditional identities. The institutions of the LIO—the United Nations, the European Union and international legal organizations—are no longer seen as pillars of a liberalism that conservatives can live with. They have become adversaries that need to be defeated.

The latter point leads to a second line of division: the relationship between liberalism and democracy, and the charge that liberal elites are a threat to democratic governance, not its guardians. As we saw earlier, the fusion of liberalism and democracy was one of the great ideological accomplishments of postwar politics, one that conservatives played a key role in creating and consolidating. Both Cold War liberals and consensus conservatives stressed the importance of institutions that could insulate liberal democracy from illiberal mass democratic movements—an accomplishment that successfully marginalized its critics on both the left and the right.

Here, too, that consensus has unravelled, and much of contemporary conservatism is engaged in a frontal assault on the idea that liberalism and democracy are simply two sides of the same coin. Institutions once revered as bulwarks of stability are attacked by many conservatives as bastions of undemocratic or anti-democratic domination by the liberal elite and its consensus conservative allies. International legal institutions are the particular focus of this hostility, though they are hardly alone. More generally, state bureaucracies and international organizations are cast by the radical right as part of a globalizing ‘administrative state’ that thwarts popular will and acts instead in the interests of the global ‘managerial elites’ who staff and direct it. Multilateralism represents a threat to (national) democracy, not a mechanism for its defence.⁵⁶ The ideas of expertise and institution-building towards shared social purposes, once among the most powerful ideological defences of the LIO, are now among its greatest weaknesses.

The backlash against economic ‘liberal globalization’ represents a third area of challenge to the LIO. Like many liberals (and others) the anti-neo-liberal right traces the economic roots of populism to the triumph of neo-liberalism in the late 1970s and 1980s. While conservatives continue to venerate the Thatcher–Reagan era for turning the electoral tide and prosecuting hawkish Cold War geopolitics, they reject what they identify as neo-liberalism masquerading as conservatism behind economic globalization.⁵⁷ Unlimited conservative support for the free market fractured and dislocated the stable communities, traditional institutions and values of religion and family that conservatives should promote. Rather than opposing liberalism's triumph, consensus conservatism contributed to it. As Oren Cass puts it,

Unfortunately, conservative economics was supplanted on the American right-of-center for the past 40 years by … market fundamentalism … Conservatives relinquished any right to advance a position vision beyond free individuals exercising free choice in the market, each presumably able to optimize his own life.⁵⁸

By contrast, the rise of economic nationalism and social conservatism advocated by figures such as current US Vice-President, J. D. Vance, represent the return of ‘actual conservatism’.⁵⁹

This marks an important shift. For the right, populism is a response to economic dislocation and the LIO's denial of the legitimacy and recognition of ‘traditional’ identities, ways of life and nationalist values. It is not an inchoate reaction to cultural dislocation or fears of being ‘left behind’. On the contrary, it represents the revival of authentic conservative ideas that for decades were marginalized by the Cold War consensus and must now be overthrown. Conservatism's future may be up for grabs, but a return to consensus is not.⁶⁰ As the signatories of ‘Against the dead consensus’ conclude:

Whatever else might be said about it, the Trump phenomenon has opened up space in which to pose these questions anew. We will guard that space jealously. And we respectfully decline to join with those who would resurrect warmed-over Reaganism and foreclose honest debate.⁶¹

The ‘backlash’ against economic globalization cannot be understood without understanding its connections to these cultural themes, and to attacks on the liberal and conservative ‘elites’ that they enable. The positions taken by President Donald Trump and his allies are only the most prominent evidence of the fracturing of the previous conservative consensus around open international markets. Equally telling is renewed energy on the libertarian right. Trump's protectionist views may be cheered at most of his rallies, but they were jeered when he spoke to a libertarian convention in May 2024.⁶² In the United Kingdom, similar tensions have riven the Conservative Party, and the most vibrant and high-profile international gatherings of conservative activists today—the Conservative Political Action Conference and National Conservatism conference show these divisions in full display. What unifies the participants is hostility not only towards liberalism, but towards a consensus conservatism that is no longer able to exclude that hostility from political prominence.

The alternatives proposed by conservative critics are not always clear, but a renewed focus on industrial strategies, state intervention and restrictions on trade mark significant shifts in conservative economic doctrine and its support for the LIO. Neo-mercantilism, together with at least rhetorical backing for the displaced or ‘forgotten’ working class, has become a feature of conservative actors across the world, particularly in the ‘Atlantic core’ of North America and Europe. This stance is usually fused with suspicion or hostility towards migration, and with claims that the combined effect of global capital and mass migration has been to undermine ‘traditional’ communities and their social mores.

A final challenge concerns the geopolitical imaginary of the West. In the postwar era this generally took the form of a culturally privileged West standing at the top of a hierarchical, but nonetheless potentially universalizable, order of individual and sovereign rights—notions deeply connected with liberal modernity. Positions differed on how far, how fast and how deep this process of westernization, modernization and ‘progress’ could run. But even if many consensus conservatives were sceptical of the ambitions of Wilsonian liberalism or modernization theories, they, like their liberal interlocutors, retained a basic faith in the power and prospects of liberal democracy and a belief that its spread was inevitable, desirable or both.

These shared commitments no longer hold. Rejecting a consensus that ran from the 1950s through neo-conservatism at the turn of the twentieth century, many of today's conservative critics assert the particularity of the West. Western culture is not the future of all. Nor it is the logical product of managing modernity, interdependence and societal complexity.⁶³ It is, instead, the product of a specific (usually ‘Judeo-Christian’) culture limited to societies where that culture has deep roots and remains resonant. This political order is not universal. It needs to be defended against its civilizational Others and rivals. It also needs to be revived and defended from liberalism, which is undermining its intellectual, cultural and political strength. From this vantage point, liberalism—as it has developed over recent decades—is one of the enemies of the West, not its essence. The unity of liberalism and the West, which once provided a basis of support for the LIO, has fractured at one of its crucial—conservative—foundations.

Conclusion

To address the crisis of the LIO, it is vital that we understand as fully as possible what that order was and where its challenges lie. Ironically, a significant barrier to this understanding has been the success of the label itself: the ‘liberal’ international order obscures as much as it illuminates. Both the foundations of the order and the sources of the crisis are broader than association with a relatively undifferentiated liberal tradition can capture. It is not just liberalism that is in crisis. What we confront is in many ways a crisis of conservatism and the conservative international order.

Most discussions in International Relations (IR) tend to trace this crisis to the end of the Cold War. Ikenberry, for example, influentially focuses on the ‘overextension’ of liberalism in the absence of superpower competition. The success of the order and the hubris that often accompanied it led to its overextension into areas and countries unused or unsuited to liberal values and institutions. Those once ‘outside’ the order moved ‘inside’ it to varying degrees and are the source of the crisis. For others, it is the politics of recognition and the ‘hypocrisy’ of liberalism that are crucial. The crisis results from liberal states and institutions consistently failing to live up to their promises and ideals of equality and justice.⁶⁴ From another angle, it is traced to the consequences of neo-liberalism, with Trump, Brexit and the rise of ‘national populism’ cast as responses to economic dislocations brought into stark relief in the global financial crisis of 2007–2009.

Each of these analyses captures a key dimension of the crisis. Interestingly, many of their points are echoed in conservative accounts. Conservatives certainly agree that the end of the Cold War marked a crucial conjuncture; they are often sympathetic to criticisms of neo-liberalism, charges of hubristic foreign policy overextension, liberal hypocrisy and the importance of the politics of recognition—particularly as they relate to classes and societies that conservatives accuse progressive liberalism of socially undermining and condescendingly disparaging. However, radical conservatives trace the crisis of the LIO well beyond the post-Cold War era and the depredations of neo-liberalism, finding its roots in deeper issues within liberal modernity that require more foundational responses.

Taking this situation seriously presents analysts of IR with crucial challenges. At a theoretical level, it requires a fundamental rethinking of the conventional IR view of liberalism and its role in the emergence and maintenance of the LIO. Relatedly, the prominence of conservative challenges to the LIO raises an obvious question: why have these dynamics been invisible to much of the field? Part of the answer lies in concepts. One of IR's peculiarities is that it has no significant place for conservatism among its competing theoretical frameworks. Instead, for over half a century the field's primary conceptual battles have been between liberalism and realism. While in the early years of the field some kinds of realism had clear affinities with conservatism,⁶⁵ as realist thinking became increasingly dominated by ‘structural’ theories from the 1980s onward the debate became narrowed to that of a systemically determined power politics and various forms of liberalism. As a set of influential ideas and historically important practices, conservatism literally disappeared in IR.⁶⁶ Failing to appreciate the impact of conservative political dynamics on the LIO is thus not just a ‘collective blind spot’ or even an outcome of the fact that ‘most studies in IR have never considered the possibility that domestic forces in core states would fundamentally challenge the LIO’;⁶⁷ it is also a product of the conceptual structuring of the field itself. As some of the most striking developments in contemporary world politics show, it is a blindness with serious analytic and political implications. There is an urgent need to look more closely at the ideological structures and coalitions supporting or pulling apart the LIO—and putting conservatism at the centre of them is essential.

Finally, while the focus of this article has been on the United States, a fuller account of the crisis needs to examine the relationship between conservatism and the LIO in other parts of the world. As indicated in this article's opening paragraphs, postwar European history displays similar dynamics. As Jan-Werner Müller has argued, the ‘liberal’ transformation of western Europe did not happen primarily at the hands of self-declared liberals. It was largely the achievement of avowedly conservative Christian democrats. In Müller's words, the West Europeans

created something new, a democracy that was highly constrained (mostly by unelected institutions, such as constitutional courts) … It is often forgotten that this new set of institutions was not justified by the inherited political languages of liberalism—because liberalism was widely seen as having paved the way for the totalitarian nightmares of the century in the first place … the Western European post-war settlement was the work, if anything, of moderate conservative forces, primarily Christian Democracy.⁶⁸

The historical role of conservatism in the construction of the specifically European parts of the LIO, its interplay with the international system and the dynamics of its current fission are crucial questions for further research. The breakdown of the liberal order today reflects cracks in its conservative foundations, as is strikingly evident in the resurgent hard or radical right in Europe today, as well as in the European policies of the Trump administration.

A different set of issues concerns dynamics outside the liberal core. It has often been observed that the LIO was not particularly ‘liberal’ in many parts of the world, where imperialism, hierarchy and ‘hypocrisy’ tended to prevail. However, postwar fusionism was also central to support for human rights and global markets that had obvious, if ambivalent, impacts across the global South. The fission of the LIO in its core is affecting these relationships, weakening support for them in the northern ‘core’ and in the South, and providing increased openings for a wide variety of counter-agendas including, but not limited to, forms of sovereigntism, regionalism and nativism.⁶⁹

Moreover, the global South's accommodation to the LIO was never wholehearted. It depended in part on a lack of alternatives, particularly in the immediate post-Cold War period. Significant ideological opposition to liberalism has persisted across the global South; while these movements often take, or are portrayed as taking, ‘progressive’ forms, they also frequently contain significant conservative dimensions, allowing them to find easy accommodation with radical conservative critics of liberalism in other parts of the world, as well as with illiberal powers such as Russia and China. What unites them is their reaction against liberalism, and against the fusionist order of the postwar era.⁷⁰ The crisis of the conservative world order is global and requires global analysis.

It is not enough to diagnose the challenges to the LIO by focusing on liberalism alone. Without its conservative dimension, the LIO's ability to defend itself is severely weakened. A return to the liberal conservatism of the past looks increasingly like a siren call, and even if radical conservative parties fail to achieve government, they have already succeeded in shifting the terms of political debate in ways that deeply undermine previous domestic and international affinities and alliances around the world. Despite hopes that the ‘mainstream’ would reassert itself, or that the radical right would collapse due to incoherence and incompetence, there are at best limited signs of the triumph of the ‘adults in the room’. Nor are those opposed to the old conservative consensus likely to recant. The crisis of the conservative international order is one of the key challenges of our time. It needs to be taken seriously.

Footnotes

Author notes