The liberal international order is crumbling under the weight of its own failures, hypocrisies and contradictions.
So this is how the so-called liberal international order ends. Not with a bang, but with a Trump.
That, at least, is how Western and especially European elites perceive the crumbling of the Western alliance and the decay of assorted international conventions – as the world-destroying handiwork of the disruptor-in-chief and his gang of vandals. In the US’s new tariff-charged trade wars with allies and, above all, in the seeming abandonment of Ukraine and perhaps even America’s fellow NATO members in Europe, they see a US administration determined to ‘destroy the rules-based world order’ and replace it with one based on ‘might is right’, as one liberal pundit has it. The Trump administration is not so much ushering in a ‘brave new world’, argues another, as ‘reverting to a dangerous old one’, dominated by great-power rivalries.
