The Illiberalism of American Liberalism

The United States’ normative and pragmatic commitment to liberal internationalism has always been more ambiguous than proponents of liberal internationalism have allowed. Although many commentators over the last year have declared Trump a major threat to the liberal world order or, even more, the herald of the end of that order, much less attention has been paid to the ways that the US has acted as an illiberal hegemon over the past 70 years. Trump’s foreign policy has in many ways articulated an extreme view of world order that rarely gets articulated or legitimated in foreign policy circles. However, I argue that skepticism towards liberal internationalism is not new in US foreign policy and, in fact, that US foreign policy during its hegemonic moment has been defined by the tension between liberal and illiberal normative tendencies. This paper discusses the US as an entrepreneur of illiberal and even authoritarian norms and practices within the international system. It problematizes the idea that normative agents are always consistent in their normative positions and hypothesizes the conditions under which a powerful actor will vacillate between liberal-leaning and illiberal-leaning normative commitments. It uses case studies from the history of US foreign policy since 1945 to identify the specific forms of illiberalism the US promoted and under which circumstances it was likely to do so. In doing so, it suggests that the origins of the current international order’s crisis lay in the eruption of deep-seated and long-sowed ambiguities.