How do we know when the current era gives way to the next one? Maybe the premise here is too flawed to help us understand today’s world. We look back on the past as discrete eras, but continuities blur the timelines. Change is a complex process, not a singular event condensed to a day or a year or even a decade. Or, as historian Michael Kimmage has often reminded me, decline is apparent in retrospect, whether Roman or American.
So, however flawed, let’s repeat the question: Is the post-1945 order coming to a cadence or a conclusion? Historian David M. Kennedy tried to answer this in Tuesday’s podcast episode, the final installment in my 5-part series marking 80 years since the end of the Second World War. I’ll return to my conversation with Kennedy in a moment.
Atop Anne Applebaum’s deeply reported article on Sudan for The Atlantic, the subheadline reads, “Sudan’s devastating civil war shows what will replace the liberal order: anarchy and greed.” Such requiems for the “rules-based order” abound in the age of Trump, as Russia brutalizes Ukraine and Israel pulverizes Palestinian life to dust in Gaza, and as the U.N. Security Council remains paralyzed. The transactionalist, nationalist, to-hell-with-human-rights approach of the U.S. president, we are told, is accelerating the demise of America’s global leadership, allowing chaos, anarchy, and greed to flourish. This view has merit, as I discussed with former Ambassador Larry André in a podcast about the mindless destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development. More recently, political theorist Robert Keohane talked to me about how President Trump is undermining American influence (soft power) with his trade war and other unforced errors.
The contention that the liberal order is in peril serves more than a historical or analytical purpose, however. It’s also political. Applebaum and Garry Kasparov, for example, are calling for Russia to be defeated in Ukraine, which would likely necessitate direct U.S. and European involvement. Boots on the ground, yes? In other words, protecting a liberal order that outlaws, rather than rewards, aggression means going to war with a nuclear-armed Kremlin. How else might Russian forces be driven back across the border?
Russia is, of course, fighting an illegal war of aggression. Vladimir Putin is a war criminal. But rather than causing a caesura in world history where the fate of liberal democracy will be determined by who controls part of one country in Eastern Europe, the Russo-Ukrainian war might be viewed as the most recent of the wars of Soviet succession, a process or continuum unfolding over the decades since the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989-91. When empires collapse, violence is the norm. To those who view Ukraine as a front line, though, Putin will not stop with Kyiv. The Baltics, Poland, or Finland is next, a claim that lacks convincing evidence but is useful to the Anne Applebaums of the global struggle between liberal order and autocracy.
Continuities…
This emerging “post-liberal” order looks a lot like the era that we’re supposedly leaving behind. The strong do as they wish, the weak take it on the chin, apologies to Thucydides. Protecting civilians from indiscriminate or genocidal violence was always aspirational after the cataclysm of 1939-45 necessitated new institutions dedicated to peace and free commerce, the now crumbling pillars of the rules-based community of nations. There is Sudan, to name one nightmare. But in the 1990s, we had Rwanda. Today, Russia dismembers Ukraine. In 1956, Moscow invaded Hungary, and then sent tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968. The United States carpet-bombed Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and imposed such debilitating sanctions on Iraq that Madeleine Albright’s reputation was permanently blemished when she defended them. The Global War on Terrorism brought us U.S. policies of torture, kidnappings (extraordinary rendition), and pre-emptive war, a multitude of crimes perpetrated in the name of maintaining security and spreading freedom, but instead destabilized and immiserated large parts of the Greater Middle East. We might lament America’s apparent retreat from global leadership under Trump, but let’s remember what U.S. militarism (and CIA depredations) has meant to much of the world. The post-1945 edifice may have helped avert another world war, but the past 80 years have hardly been peaceful.
Today, Israeli government ministers proudly broadcast their intent to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians while Jewish settlers rampage and murder Palestinians in the West Bank — all with the unflinching support of the liberal order’s most powerful guardian.
What all this means is I’m grappling with what it signifies to enter a new period in international relations, if this is really the case. In my conversation with David M. Kennedy, I said that it feels like the post-1945 era is fading in our rear-view mirror, but I can’t be sure. Maybe the best answer I can give is yes and no. U.S hegemony does appear to be waning, a natural consequence of the rise of China and its 1.4 billion people, Kennedy says. And the era of free trade that helped lift millions out of poverty is being dismantled, although we must not ignore the negative political consequences of NAFTA — consequences that cracked the post-Cold War “neoliberal” consensus.
“The dominant, salient characteristic of the world the war created was not only America’s emergence onto the world stage in a permanent, lasting, long-term way, but becoming the hegemonic power in that system. And it has been clear to a lot of observers that the degree of hegemony that the United States enjoyed for at least one, if not two, generations after 1945 has been eroding for all kinds of quite anticipatable and natural reasons. We don’t have the dominant role in the world economy. We’ve long since lost the nuclear monopoly that we enjoyed for a few years after the war. We have rival powers, most notably China, that are putting themselves in a position to challenge American leadership and domination of international institutions. So, this is a process that has been going on for a long time, and whether this country can manage the transition to a world in which we are a major power but not the major power is a really interesting question,” he says.
David M. Kennedy is one of my favorite historians. He has written essential books about U.S. history, including Over Here: The First World War and American Society and the monumental Freedom From Fear, which is part of the Oxford History of the United States and a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Also discussed in the podcast: the revolutionary changes in America between 1940 and 1945; how FDR poorly prepared the public for the coming peace; why World War II still fascinates us; reluctance on the part of ordinary U.S. citizens to sustain an international presence after 1945; Cold War’s onset; current skepticism concerning U.S. interventionism; and much else.
What’s next?
Please subscribe (free) to this newsletter for updates on History As It Happens. In the meantime, enjoy my catalog of 470 episodes here. You can also write me at martinjdicaro@gmail.com. If you have an idea for a future podcast topic, I’d love to hear it. Over the years, several listener recommendations have been turned into episodes.