Are There Better Foreign Policy Alternatives to Liberal Internationalism?
Despite its internal contradictions and hypocrisy, ditching it will lead to a more cynical and grim world
Last summer, in Washington, D.C., the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism—The UnPopulist’s parent organization—convened the largest gathering of liberals from around the world for the very first Liberalism for the 21st Century conference. While those who couldn’t attend missed out on a truly special occasion, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered: We’ve published much of the conference here on our page and also on our YouTube channel.
ISMA’s inaugural conference was a great success by all accounts—check out the recaps written by
for his newsletter, for The Dispatch, and for The Bulwark.Today, with a week to go before Donald Trump is inaugurated, we wanted to share with you our panel on liberal internationalism, an approach to foreign policy that Trump’s America First agenda challenges.
At the conference, David Miliband, former foreign secretary of the United Kingdom and current president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, facilitated a discussion with Max Boot, senior fellow in national security studies for the Council on Foreign Relations and author of a new biography on Ronald Reagan, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first woman director of policy planning in the U.S. Department of State and current CEO of New America, and Samuel Moyn, Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University and author of 2023’s Liberalism Against Itself.
We encourage you to watch the video of this panel discussion in its entirety, which includes a lively Q&A section that is not featured in the edited transcript below.
The following transcript of the panel discussion has been adjusted for flow and clarity.
David Miliband: Today, we’re going to be thinking about global risks, global stakes, global needs, and global responsibilities. The panel have plenty to disagree about, but there are two key things that they’re agreed on. The first is that liberalism in foreign policy has been quite confused, quite divided, quite ill-defined in the last 20 or 30 years, and secondly, that the failings of liberal foreign policies have been an important part of the crisis of liberalism.
I thought it would make most sense to start by asking the panel to do some defining of terms. And I thought we’d start with the question: What does liberal internationalism mean? Max, let’s start with you.
Max Boot: Liberal internationalism is the pursuit of a global system that is rules-based and is conducive to the flowering of liberty. It doesn’t necessarily mean that every country is going to be liberal and democratic, but it is a foreign policy that is trying to the greatest extent possible—and I want to underline possible—to defend and extend the sphere of liberal democracies around the world and to build a world where disputes are resolved peacefully and amicably and not at gunpoint.
I think that’s an ambitious objective, and certainly we have not come close to the kind of grandiose hopes laid out by Woodrow Wilson and others more than a century ago of ending all war or making the world safe for democracy—or, as George W. Bush put it in his second inaugural: ending evil in the world. Obviously, we’re a long way from achieving that. In fact, I’d say we’re going in the wrong direction. But while the record of liberal internationalism has had many failures, and while it has often overreached (such as in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan), on the whole, liberal internationalism also has had tremendous achievements.
Look at Europe—since 1945, it has managed to leave behind its bloody history of conflict, and, outside the Borderlands, but certainly up to the Russian border now, has created a sphere of peace, security, and liberal democracy that would have been unthinkable in the past. Look at the developments in Asia, in places like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and other countries that are also part of this liberal-democratic world order. I think liberal internationalism is truly the only policy that makes moral and strategic sense for a liberal democracy.
Obviously, there will be massive disagreements on how to implement it. It’s not like a cookie cutter kit. There will be very strong debates over prudence and policy. There are lots of good liberal internationalists who were opposed to the war in Iraq. There are many liberal internationalists—including, I’m sad to say, me—who were in favor of it. It’s something I now regret. It’s an example of how ambitions can run ahead of capabilities and produce disasters. But I don’t think that that’s an argument for abandoning liberal internationalism—I think it’s an argument for trying to implement it more prudently and sensibly.
Miliband: Just before I go to Anne-Marie, how did neoconservatism become a movement that embraced liberal internationalism?
Boot: That is a great question, since I used to be known as a neocon and nowadays I like to call myself an “ex con.” Of course, “neocon” has many meanings. It’s often used pejoratively to mean Jewish conservatives, or Jews in general, who are part of a global cabal that is secretly manipulating politics (people like George Soros and Paul Wolfowitz and others).
“Democracy versus autocracy is not the right way to understand the international agenda today. The international agenda should be understood as a tussle between impunity on the one hand—which means power without responsibility, crime without punishment—and accountability on the other, such as checks and balances. The Atlas of Impunity, a project I’m involved in, measures every country in the world on five dimensions of impunity: conflict, governance, human rights, economic exploitation— which can be the exploitation of workers or the expropriation of property rights by the state—and environmental degradation.” — David Miliband
That’s not how we’re using it here, of course, but that’s one way that it is popularly used—as a synonym for Jews. I think, more dispassionately and analytically, it’s basically a category to describe conservatives who embrace a kind of liberal-internationalist vision of foreign policy and put an emphasis on idealism rather than the cynical realpolitik associated—perhaps unfairly—with people like Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.
Miliband: Anne-Marie, what does liberal internationalism mean to you?
Anne-Marie Slaughter: I remember it was three or four years ago when we put out a special issue of Foreign Affairs devoted to liberal internationalism, or the liberal international order, and the group of authors, not surprisingly, spent at least one and a half conferences trying to figure out what liberal internationalism was.
I see two broad interpretations. The easiest is simply a rules-based order: We believe in a world of multilateral institutions that have rules—as Louis Henkin once said, “most nations obey most of international law most of the time.” That is the minimalist view. The weightier view is what Max was articulating, which is a values-based international order, where, yes, there are rules, but they’re not just any rules. Indeed, if you had Congress of Vienna rules and all the great powers today agreed on them, that would not qualify as a liberal international order—it would qualify as a world order or an international order, but not a liberal international order.
So, okay, liberal internationalism is values-based. But what exactly are those values? And how are they perceived? So I went back and looked at the Princeton Project on National Security that John Ikenberry, the apostle of liberal international order, and I ran from 2004 to 2007, and we called for a world of liberty under law. So, for me, liberal internationalism is a world of order, of law, that enables the maximum liberty of the maximum number of people. I, in general, believe that liberal democracy will get you there, but I do not think that the liberal international order privileges, or necessarily should privilege, democracies against autocracies. I think there is a much richer account of liberty, which many of you have been discussing today, that should be embedded in the pursuit of a liberal international order.
That also means it should be pursued multilaterally. In other words, I do not think that the liberal international order that we’ve constructed is consistent with unilateralism or, even though I think we can debate this, many-lateralism. I think that there is a presumption in the concept of liberal internationalism that all states are equal, just as all individuals are equal, with all the tensions that exist in both cases. And that also is a commitment to at least a degree of multilateral pursuit of desirable goals in the liberal international world.
Miliband: As a bridge to the question to Samuel, how significant in that story do you feel the 1945 settlement was to the Congress of Vienna 100 plus years earlier? Do you see the 1945 settlement as an iconic moment, when, for the first time, the rights of individuals were put into international law alongside the rights of states, or is that to fall into a kind of golden ageism that isn’t appropriate?
Slaughter: I see 1945 as the culmination of a process that really started with the Hague Conventions and arbitration in the late 19th century. If you remember, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is created in 1910—and at that time we are already seeing a move from straight out war to arbitration to some regulation of war in various ways. Then Woodrow Wilson. Then the first attempt with the 14 principles of the League of Nations. Then 1945 is a compromise version that rejects the all-out liberalism of Wilson. Wilson wanted an equivalent of NATO. He wanted a collective security guarantee where everybody said, “We’ll come to your aid if you’re attacked.” The UN is not that. The UN is, “We will refrain.” And the UN famously is also a marriage of liberal internationalism with the realism of the Security Council. So I think there’s a whole movement that is deeply connected both to the threat of great power war but also to reinterpretations and understandings of liberal democracy and the rule of law in the 20th century. And many of those need to be updated for today.
Miliband: Professor Samuel Moyn?
Samuel Moyn: I love the anecdote told about Mohandas Gandhi: When he was asked about Western civilization, he famously replied, “Someone should try it someday.” And I think that’s true of liberal internationalism. I would define it, at least aspirationally, as the project of bringing about freedom and equality of all on a world scale. And then one has to ask, Who hijacked the idea and for what project so far, and how can we rescue liberalism from the liberals? Because that’s where I think we stand, just generally, in the conversations across this entire conference. But it’s maybe clearest when it comes to liberal geopolitics.
I don’t want to tell the whole story of liberal geopolitics, starting with the ascendancy of David’s country [Britain] and the era of liberal imperialism, but it’s worth stopping in the period after World War I and before World War II, when the self-styled American internationalists were legalists, and they really believed in a utopia of enforced law, not a rules-based international order from which this country could claim exemption, which is what the rules-based international order talked about so fulsomely since 2016 has ended up meaning. But when the phrase “liberal internationalism” became popular, it was only in the 1980s and I would say it was amongst policy-makers or journalists like Richard Holbrook, founding Foreign Policy magazine, some intellectuals in international relations, and I would say what they wanted then was to avoid the geopolitics of George McGovern in this country, who’d gone down to such catastrophic defeat electorally, while also steering clear of Ronald Reagan.
But what they in fact did, for all those decades, was to embrace a geopolitics that was Reaganism with a discount. What I mean by that is, when I was young, these two camps were fighting: the liberal internationalists and the neoconservatives. And they were at one another’s throats, and they believed they were mortal enemies. But when we look back, it seems like they were frenemies. They actually agreed about a lot, and they agreed about some big mistakes, I think, in retrospect, that have led to the current crisis of liberalism. One had to do with economics, because the post-1945 international order, whatever you want to say about it, left a lot of policy autonomy for national elites to choose their economic arrangements, including more egalitarian ones. But the period since Reaganism has been what’s been called at this conference the neoliberal era. And I think liberal internationalists either didn’t have much to say about economics, the economic foundations of a peaceful and just world, or they believed in neoliberalism. And of course, the result is all the instability, not least in this country, that we’re seeing.
Then I think the other mistake, the way in which the two groups were proximate, had to do with military solutions. And maybe we don’t need to dwell on that, because I think there’s been a lot of second thoughts, at least, about the Iraq War. And liberal internationalism, sadly, I think came to mean forceful responses, sometimes for beneficent ends, but usually with dreadful results. And so we’re in a period where I think liberals have to revisit their neoliberalism and militarism if they want to make liberalism credible to enough people.
Miliband: The sad truth is that there are very good examples of how militant liberalism has led to disaster. But there’s also some good examples of refusal to act, but have also led to disaster. Sam, it’s easy to think of some low points of liberal internationalism. What have been the high points of liberal internationalism?
Moyn: That’s a hard one for me. I think that the post-1945 order, for all of the faults we might find in it, has, in its defense, been the most peaceful order in the global north, and that is not to be trivialized. And especially, at least until recent events—i.e., the Ukraine war—it did do a good job in pacifying the continent of Europe in particular. I think that was its main achievement for a while. I think those who founded that same post-1945 world order could boast at least a framework in which there could be lots and lots of economic success shared widely enough in transatlantic societies to lead to stability which they’re no longer experiencing domestically.
So I look back and I’m not finding a lot of wars declared by liberals, certainly in my lifetime, that have made the world a better place. Since I shouldn’t dwell on Iraq, I do think it’s worth remembering Libya, because the Libyan invasion was one that is easy to forget. But it’s one that bears a lot of thought alongside the Iraq War. Just to replay the tape for one second if you don’t know or have forgotten the events involved: This occurred under a Democratic president, not a Republican one, and it really did respond, unlike in the Iraq case, to a credible threat of mass civilian harm. And many people, including me, felt something did need to be done, but what was done turned out to be regime change. And the results have been horrendous. For a while, it created an ungoverned space with, in the end, Russian-Turkish proxies, ongoing instability, a civil war that keeps getting restarted, and mass death almost certainly much worse than would have otherwise taken place. So it means that Iraq, whatever you think about the War on Terror generally, is not a one-off, and this militarist choice shouldn’t be treated as exceptional, but something to which liberals themselves have been tempted in recent history. And then I think we need to look in the mirror as liberals to decide how to cure ourselves of that kind of mistake.
Miliband: You did a very good job of avoiding my question. You’d think you were in politics the way you mentioned the low points rather than the high points! Anne-Marie, can you think of any high points?
Slaughter: Yes, I can. I think we agree on the first high point: it’s hard to make the case that we would not have had far more aggressive war since 1945 without the liberal international order. Although by and large we have seen cases of aggressive war—the first Gulf War, other attacks—those are striking because they violated the norm. I teach international law, and when I tell young people that prior to 1945, or even just prior to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, it was perfectly legal to invade another country ... it’s somewhat unthinkable now. So I think we have to say that that’s a high point.
I’ll give you two other high points. One is the way, whether intentional or not, that the liberal international order has steadily made room for individuals alongside states. So, you have the 1945 agreement, you have Article 2.4 of the United Nations Charter, but then you also have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which opens the door to the international conventions on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Then, in 1976, in one of the first big events as an 18 year old aware of the world, I remember very clearly when Jimmy Carter declared that the United States was going to pay attention to human rights. It took decades, but that is now a big part of the policy of many countries—often abused, often used as a justification for all sorts of things that it shouldn’t be used for. But, on balance, a world in which human rights matter is better, even if some are only playing lip service to them. That’s clearly a deep part of liberal internationalism.
“Liberal internationalism is a world of order, of law, that enables the maximum liberty of the maximum number of people. I, in general, believe that liberal democracy will get you there, but I do not think that the liberal international order privileges, or necessarily should privilege, democracies against autocracies.” — Anne-Marie Slaughter
Alongside that, as more and more states have taken their full place, rightly, in the United Nations, we have gone beyond negative rights to the positive rights of, first, the Millennium Development Goals and now the Sustainable Development Goals, which support both the negative and positive liberty of individuals around the world. So, something was done. Again, whether it was intentional or not, that interstate pact, heavily leavened with realism so that five states are allowed to be more equal than others, has enabled the development of an international regime that really is, at least aspirationally, much more aimed at making everyone in the world better off.
The last thing I would say is that some of the specialized agencies have made a very big difference. David, there’s nobody better placed than you to think about: What would the world be without the High Commissioner for Refugees? They might not be ideal, but a number of those specialized agencies—I’d also say the peacekeeping ones—have had a much better record than most people give them credit for and have made a positive difference. So those are three high points.
Boot: I mean, I think there are a lot of high points, and I don’t think that liberal internationalists have anything to apologize for. I would say, to paraphrase Churchill: Liberal internationalism is the very worst theory of international relations, except for every other. If you think about what the alternatives to liberal internationalism are, you have cold-blooded realpolitik, which doesn’t care about human rights or democracy, or you have very narrow conceptions of national self-interest, like America First, which basically says every nation can try to screw over every other nation to the greatest extent possible and not cooperate with any other and pursue beggar-thy-neighbor policies and only care about its own citizens and not care about the world at large. Is that the world we want to live in when we are facing these transnational threats like climate change or invasions of sovereign countries like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or terrorism or so many other transnational ills?
We don’t have the luxury now—and I don’t think we ever have, but we certainly don’t have it now—of concluding that we don’t care about what happens to the rest of the world, or that we don’t care about any human rights or basic equities in the world, and that all we care about is this very narrow conception of national self-interest. That is a recipe for disaster. In fact, it has been a recipe for disaster. We weren’t pursuing liberal internationalist policies in the 1930s when we got World War II. Let’s remember what the alternative to liberal internationalism is: It sucks; it is not good; it is the worst war that human history has ever seen.
Sure, there have been stumbles for liberal internationalism since 1945. But it is also possible to overuse the term: Since you can say the United States is a major part of liberal internationalism, any mistake you want to point out in U.S. foreign policy can be ascribed to liberal internationalism. This seems to me a gross exaggeration, because of course every country makes grave mistakes. But I would say, overall, liberal internationalism has delivered the greatest amount of human good for the world of any system in world history. If you think about the number of people who live in peace and prosperity, democracy and freedom, today, it’s more than at any point in human history. This is despite something like 15 years of backsliding, in part because we have lost our willingness or ability to defend human rights, to defend democracy. But even despite all that backsliding, we still live in an infinitely better world than we lived in prior to the liberal-democratic era that was at least partially inaugurated in 1945.
When I see what’s happened in Europe and in Japan and South Korea and so many other places, it is truly a monument to liberal internationalism. If we had been following realpolitik or America First policies in 1945, you better believe that Germany, Japan, and other countries would not be liberal-democratic allies of the United States today. What we did with those defeated nations in World War 2, and transformed them from enemies into allies, from dictatorships into liberal democracies, was a tremendous achievement. That was the greatest act of altruism in human history.
Right now, you’re seeing the importance of liberal internationalism, because there are 50 countries around the world that are rallying to defend Ukraine from this horrible aggression perpetrated by Vladimir Putin. If we don’t have liberal internationalism, Ukraine gets told, “You’re on your own, buddy.” We may actually be there a year from now, because the leading candidate for the U.S. presidency says that he wants to tell Putin, “You can do whatever the hell you want.” That is the opposite of liberal internationalism. Those of us who believe in liberal internationalism maintain that there has to be a rules-based order where people like Putin are not allowed to do whatever the hell they want, because if we allow them to get away with mass murder, aggression, crimes against humanity, we are going to live in an extremely grim world, much grimmer than it is already today.
Miliband: It’s interesting that you use the word “altruism” with respect to America’s engagement with Japan and Germany. Because where I want to take the conversation next is to the relationship between liberal internationalism and liberal democracy. I think it was Jeane Kirkpatrick who said, “We should support the spread of democracy, because democracies don’t declare war on each other.” I think John Ikenberry, in his history of the development of the liberal international order, had a slightly different argument about the relationship between liberal internationalism and liberal democracy. His argument was, as I remember it, that the post-war pioneers of the liberal international order saw the international order supporting democracy at home, not the other way around. It wasn’t that the liberal international order would spread democracy abroad. It was that it would be a bulwark to support democracy at home.
And so I think it’s right to ask the three of you, because I think you’ll have very different views on this: What is the relationship between liberal internationalism and liberal democracy, in your mind? Am I right in saying, Max, that your argument would be that liberal internationalism should be seeking to spread democracy and human rights, both as an altruistic goal, but also as a self-interested goal?
Boot: I would say, yes, if we can spread democracy and human rights and do it in practical ways that are not likely to backfire or be excessively costly, then we should do it. But I would also say that my thinking on this has changed a little bit since the catastrophe in Iraq—and, to a certain extent, in light of the problems that were alluded to in Libya.
It’s much more practical to have a foreign policy based on defending democracy rather than exporting democracy, because when you’re defending democracy, you’re defending countries that are already free and democratic, and that includes countries like Ukraine today. That’s a much more doable and achievable goal, I would say, than trying to export democracy to places like Iraq or Afghanistan, where it’s very hard to impose anything from the outside. So I think we should be a little bit more modest, but we certainly should not give up our advocacy of democracy, because spreading and advocating democracy doesn’t necessarily mean doing so at gunpoint. In most cases, it means doing things like the National Endowment for Democracy, supporting dissidents and independent press around the world, pushing for the rule of law. I think these are all good things that we should do not only out of moral altruism but also out of enlightened self-interest. Because I believe that a world of liberal democracies is more conducive to American interests and to the interests of other liberal democracies than a world full of autocracies.
Miliband: You hear this argument a lot: We’ve got to defend Ukraine because it’s a democracy. But actually, the argument of the rules-based order is that it was as important to defend Kuwait from invasion by Iraq, even though it wasn’t a democracy, for the sustenance of international order. So I want to give you another run at the fence: How much does it matter that Ukraine was a democracy in a world where international law is in such retreat? Wouldn’t it have been as important to defend the neighbor of Russia from Russia’s invasion, whatever its domestic arrangements?
Boot: I agree that you can’t allow cross-border aggression no matter the form of government in the country that’s being attacked. And obviously, as you say, we defended Kuwait, which was far from a democracy. And I think that was the right thing to do, because it helped to preserve the norm of no cross-border aggression. But I will say that the fact that Ukraine is a liberal democracy certainly makes me and a lot of other people a lot more passionate in our advocacy and defense of Ukraine. I think it would be all the more tragic if Putin were able to snuff out not only Ukraine’s freedom, but its very existence.
Miliband: Anne-Marie, liberal democracy and liberal internationalism—what is the relationship between the two?
Slaughter: I’m going to go back to Wilson. It is often misunderstood that when Wilson said, “The world must be made safe for democracy,” he was talking about wanting to spread democracy. That’s not the case. John Milton Cooper, who is a Wilson scholar, parses this very carefully and points out that if Wilson had wanted to say, “We need to save the world for democracy,” he would have said that. Wilson used the passive. He said, “The world needs to be made safe for democracy”; meaning—and this goes to directly to the question—we need an international order that will allow democracies to flourish. And in that regard, I think I’m aligned with Max that that’s very different than saying, we’re going to promote democracy around the world. It is saying: We don’t want a world in which democracies can be snuffed out. We don’t want a world in which there is unmitigated international aggression, where you just never get the chance to be able to build the economic and social conditions you need for a successful democracy.
So the connection, for me, is exactly that: that in the building of the liberal international order, you wanted to create the stability, the free trade, and the other things that we thought were necessary—“we” being the United States and Britain and the other principal players in developing the United Nations—to create a stable enough and rules-bound international order to allow democracies to flourish within it.
I’ll add, though, that my own thinking here has changed: In the Princeton Project on National Security, where we call for a world of liberty under law, John Ikenberry and I also called for a concert of democracies. It was a different time, and we very strongly felt that there needed to be a place where liberal democracies could come together, could strengthen one another. We were not advocating spreading democracy by force, far from it, but that this was a very important line: democracies versus autocracies. That is exactly what President Biden wrote in Foreign Affairs before he came into power. By that time, and certainly by now, I have changed my thinking. I think it is not a helpful dividing line. I think it excludes many countries that are doing a pretty good job of offering a decent life to their citizens—China included, on that issue. And saying, Are you a democracy or not? (and often of course we get to decide because we run Freedom House and rankings of democracy) I don’t think is that helpful in terms of self-interest, or for engaging countries around the world to improve conditions in those countries. But even more fundamentally, I don’t think it gets at a lot of the key things that we do need for people around the world to have a better life or to have better government. (And, David, I’ll call on you to articulate something you talked about in the discussions before this panel: impunity versus accountability. I think this is extremely important. It’s the essence of the rule of law.)
I would also say that we need to combine civil and political rights and economic, social, and cultural rights. I’d like to see a world in which we merge the Freedom House account, the Freedom House Index, and the Human Development Index, and think about what states come out highest on that, and think of those as the states that are offering their people the best lives, rather than a very hard-to-apply line between democracies and autocracies. Note that President Biden, when he had his meeting of democracies, he immediately changed the way he was talking about it, because they couldn’t come up with a list of democracies without offending lots of nations.
Miliband: So, just a footnote. Anne-Marie referred to a project that I’m involved in called The Atlas of Impunity. I chair the advisory board and its argument is that democracy versus autocracy is not the right way to understand the international agenda today. The international agenda should be understood as a tussle between impunity on the one hand—which means power without responsibility, crime without punishment—and accountability on the other, such as checks and balances. The Atlas of Impunity measures every country in the world on five dimensions of impunity: conflict, governance, human rights, economic exploitation— which can be the exploitation of workers or the expropriation of property rights by the state—and environmental degradation. The environmental angle is interesting, the argument being that, because the planet has no votes and the future has no votes, there’s impunity in the relationship between current generations and the planet. And the Atlas of Impunity argument is an alternative—it frames the democracy versus autocracy argument. And I think as plays into the into this debate in exactly the way that Anne-Marie has said.
Boot: I think that that gets at the connection between domestic and foreign policy, because leaders that have impunity at home act with impunity abroad.
Miliband: Do you agree with that, Sam?
Moyn: Sure, but it can’t be selective. I mean, it can’t have a criminal responsibility on a worldwide scale that simultaneously exempts the most powerful actors. That would be a familiar result, after all, because criminal law in most countries, including this one, tends to do better at throwing the weak in jail and letting the strong off scot-free.
But I have a broader answer to your question about the inner relationship between liberal internationalism and liberal democracy, which is really an essential question. To me, this question seems like the wrong place for a liberal to start to worry about spreading freedom and equality, just because it seems as if we’ve learned that, in the era when we talked a lot about spreading it, we failed to exemplify it, and have risked losing democracy at home as a result. And not to beat my dead hobby horses, but the neoliberal commitments of all those decades led to a rampant inequality, which played in some respects into the unhappiness of American voters. When you just look at the rates at which American veterans, especially of the Iraq War, went for Trump, there, too, the connection is vivid. So, to me, the first task of a liberal is to exemplify freedom and equality, where she or he can make change most readily.
“I would define liberal internationalism, at least aspirationally, as the project of bringing about freedom and equality of all on a world scale. And then one has to ask, ‘Who hijacked the idea and for what project so far, and how can we rescue liberalism from the liberals’?” — Samuel Moyn
But then I think, we know that. Jake Sullivan knows that. When Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, Sullivan reported that he felt the humility of the defeated, and his central idea is the interrelationship of domestic and foreign affairs, especially so that Americans can understand that their foreign policy serves them, too. Now that could be taken too far, and maybe Sullivan is taking it too far, because any cosmopolitan view should not think that northern workers should be saved so that they keep democracy going, if that means that other places don’t get the benefits of free trade. That seems to be not just where Trump’s policies went and will go, but to a degree, some of Biden’s and Sullivan’s.
But the broader point is, just starting at home, I do agree—I mean, I’m going to say something in favor of Max’s former neoconservatism; there’s a kernel I would embrace in it—that it can’t just be about defending democracy as at least a second step, after liberals have exemplified freedom and equality locally. It has to be concern about the fate of those suffering under despotism. It’s just that the tools that were imagined to work in both situations, defending democracy abroad and creating the conditions for it, were the wrong ones. And I think we’re just at the beginning of trying to forge different tools.
Miliband: So, I was going to take the argument to current foreign policy questions—Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza—but in light of what you’ve just said, Sam, I think we should jump to a question which you’ve raised: the issue of the extent to which voters buy in to anything that any of us have said about what liberal internationalism should mean, and the extent to which the strategic patience, the enlightened altruism, the commitment to international sustainable development goals, has any political market in any of the countries represented here, not just the Western democratic countries, but around the world.
We know that America First arguments are replicated in India First arguments—even in Britain First arguments, you can hear them. And I think it would be great to have the three of you talk about how you see the domestic political challenge of making the argument for liberal internationalism. Once you’ve done so, I’ll tell you about the great success of the campaign against Brexit, and what that tells you about how to withstand the forces of reaction. Max?
Boot: It’s obviously a challenging time to consider that question, because we could be just four months away from the election of a president who espouses an America First isolationism that we have not seen in this country since 1941. But I think you have to hold that thought in your head at the same time as you consider other thoughts, such as that according to the public opinion polls, NATO is very popular. Ukraine is very popular. Americans are not clamoring for us to abandon Europe. They’re not clamoring for us to abandon Ukraine. They’re not clamoring for us to abandon South Korea and Japan and other allies around the world. They are certainly not clamoring for us to abandon Israel, even though we may, in fact, wind up abandoning a lot of those allies because of the choice they make in November. But if they do elect Trump, I don’t think it’s because they wanted to pull out of NATO. You can argue about why they want to elect him, but I think it has more to do with issues like the border and immigration and the nonsense that he spews about American domestic policy and so forth.
“Liberal internationalism is the pursuit of a global system that is rules-based and is conducive to the flowering of liberty. It doesn’t necessarily mean that every country is going to be liberal and democratic, but it is a foreign policy that is trying to the greatest extent possible to defend and extend the sphere of liberal democracies around the world and to build a world where disputes are resolved peacefully and amicably and not at gunpoint.” — Max Boot
I think there is still fairly broad support for a liberal internationalist foreign policy. But the tragedy is that it may not matter much in the end, because of the huge sway that the president in our system has over foreign policy. That’s another example of what I was saying before about the connection between domestic and foreign policy, because Trump wants impunity in domestic policy, which he’s being granted by the Supreme Court. He wants to tear down our democracy at home. And abroad he wants to make common cause with Putin and other dictators around the world. I mean, there’s a hardcore MAGA base that is probably clamoring for those policies, but I think it’s a fairly small percentage of the U.S. population that actually wants to embrace Putin—even most of the Republican Party, I don’t think, has any love for Putin or has a love affair with Kim Jong Un or these bizarre positions that Trump has taken. I think Trump could easily and probably will, on the current trajectory, prevail, but I don’t think it’s going to be a referendum against the kind of foreign policy that we are pursuing today.
Miliband: I can’t resist the following, and please don’t take it as a sort of clever-ass British debating thing, but if NATO and other international engagement is so popular in the U.S., why is international institutional engagement, international treaties, even the Law of the Sea, which America follows but refuses to sign ... why is this country so allergic to having those international treaty obligations?
Boot: I think this is part of the cost you pay when you’re the most powerful country. I think for the Americans who want to have rule of law for other countries, but not necessarily for ourselves ... I think there is an element of hypocrisy there, for sure.
Miliband: Anne-Marie, why don’t you come on in? What will the voters swallow?
Slaughter: Well, I was going to say to Max that he chose NATO and Ukraine—one, more militarist and two, war in Europe, which has involved defending a white country against a traditional dictator. There are many other wars where our support does not pull nearly so well. Indeed, the United Nations is deeply unpopular. It’s more popular among Democratic presidents, but not necessarily Democratic voters. It’s certainly not high on anybody’s list. And in general, foreign aid is unpopular. I mean, there are pockets of strongly religious groups in this country that support foreign aid. But the majority of Americans seem to think we spend 7% to 15% of our GDP on all those undeserving countries all around the world. So I really don’t think that the liberal international order is going to get votes, and having tried as a campaign adviser periodically to offer what to me were very inspiring visions of a reformed international order, the Pauls in the room just laughed at me.
I do think, to quote Professor Fish on the last panel, that there is a vision of the United States as the beacon, as the shining city on the hill, but in the global context, that really in the right circumstances Americans thrill to that. I grew up believing so strongly—I’m half Belgian, and my grandfather was at Dunkirk and got to Britain and fought with the British SAS—in this vision that we had been there when it counted, that we actually were fighting for the things we believed in globally, that I think you can still get people to respond to. But it’s not going to be a top issue in the election. But I think it can be part of a story that Americans want to hear and that we are absolutely lacking. I very much believe we need more of a really compelling and patriotic story.
What I would say, though, about the relationship between the liberal international order and voters going forward is a different one: Yes, the country has been 80% European American since our founding. And it’s not all that surprising that we support wars in Europe more than we support wars in other places. Those are our folks. By 2027, there will not be a European American majority among Americans under 30. On college campuses, you’re seeing that right now—there is no European American majority on college campuses now, and by the 2040s that will be true of the whole country. Well, we’ve seen all the social turbulence that that’s causing, but that is also going to mean many more Americans, 30 to 35%, will be Hispanic. They’re going to pay a lot more attention to what is happening in Mexico and Central America and Latin America, because those are their families, and you have an entirely new African diaspora. We are here in Washington, D.C., where I always say, I defy you to find a Washington cab driver who is not Ethiopian or some other group. And the Ethiopians in particular, I don’t know how they locked it up. These are people who, every time I’m in a cab, I talk to them about how they got here, where their kids are. I mean, it’s a really quite wonderful story very often, but that will be a different relationship to Africa, just like Asian Americans will have different relationships to South Asia and East Asia.
So, I actually think, going forward, if we’re talking about liberalism in this century, we’re a country that is going to reflect and is already reflecting the entire world. That is an extraordinary asset—in domestic policy but certainly in foreign policy. If we do it right, we care much more about the rest of the world. But we should also be smarter about how we actually engage because we will, in fact, have people who are experts in those parts of the world. We’ll have diaspora groups, too, who are extreme in different ways. But we will be in a position to connect the world and affect the world in much better ways than I think we could as European Americans governing.
Moyn: Just a couple of brief comments. The importance of what Anne-Marie said can’t be overstated. But then we need to think about the global south as a much more important factor in liberal thinking about the international order. Remember Fiona Hill’s brilliant talk about the implications of Gaza for the sustenance of the Ukraine War, where she observed that so many countries now think of transatlantic liberals as just too hypocritical and selective, as a result of our Gaza policy, to be trustworthy brokers of an idea of rules or an idea of freedom. But the domestic changes in our population, as already the youth response to the Gaza war demonstrate, is going to change a lot, and I think it’ll be very interesting to see how liberalism changes as a result.
But a kind of bigger response to David’s question, since it’s absolutely central, is in a realist direction. Progressive realism is now making the rounds as a result of David’s successor meme. But I would say any liberal has to be concerned first and foremost about the effect of his or her policies, domestic or international, on whether not just reelection is possible, but whether the liberal regime survives. And what I’ve been saying is that the mistakes that were made have raised the question of whether that can happen. I think that’s a kind of common fear of American liberals that we are on the knife edge. But then we need to ask, as Jake Sullivan is asking, not so much about war and peace, which are the kind of focal points of discussions of foreign policy, important as they are, but also about the international economic rules, who they benefit, who they leave stagnant, because the sad fact is that since the phrase “liberal internationalism” became popular, we’ve seen the victory of the rich on a global scale. And I’m not saying that’s the only reason democracy is in crisis, but in the United States, I think it’s a big one.
Boot: I will just say, to save democracy in the United States, I don’t think we need to rethink our entire foreign and international economic policy. I think we need a younger Democratic candidate.
Moyn: Well, agreed.
Miliband: Richard Holbrook talked about the dangers. He had this extraordinary phrase about the danger of the militarization of diplomacy. There’s also a danger in the economization of diplomacy. If diplomacy is reduced to being a matter of what it can deliver to the “middle class,” you’re setting yourself up for a very, very difficult equation. And one of my learnings in politics is that you can instrumentalize questions and parcel them up. Someone said in a previous session rather well: You’re not going to win an election on prescription drug prices. You might win an election on a big argument, or many big arguments, but on a few arguments you won’t win it, and prescription drug prices might be an example of that. But you’ve got to make a bigger argument in diplomacy, you have to make a bigger argument than the dollars and cents, pounds and pence, in your pocket. And I think it’s a leadership argument.
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Glad to see Max Boots’ comment about altruism was quickly challenged. It was absolutely in our best interest to rebuild Germany & Japan after the war. This was an act of SELF-INTEREST, not some selfless act which benefited only one side.
Altruism is a moral dead end.
There is a better alternative since there is no need for foreign policies. The world needs internal global governance and democracy for real. https://www.democracywithoutborders.org/promoting-global-citizenship/