Matt Welch’s passionate monologue on the most recent episode of the Fifth Column podcast reveals the substance underneath the foreign policy debate riling America today. “Do I have to be the last globalist?” he asked. “I’ll be the f—ing last globalist. It’s something to think about more seriously.” He meant that “globalist” has become such a toxic pejorative that nobody is willing to stand behind it. But there is something behind it, and we should be having a real conversation. So, let’s do that. In this post I am going to explain what the liberal rules-based order is (that’s a big part of what is referred to as “globalism”), do my best to pass the ideological Turing test against the liberal rules-based order, and then give my earnest case for it after all.
Here we go.
The Liberal Rules-Based Order AKA Globalism
Do I have to be the last globalist? I’ll be the f—ing last globalist.
Matt Welch
It’s something to think about more seriously.
The kind of globalism that is worth defending and that has broad-based support is the liberal international order or the rules-based order. The first thing to understand about the rules-based order is that we, meaning Americans, built it. We didn’t built it alone, but in the wake of World War 2 we led the way.
The fundamental concept behind the rules-based order is just that: rules. For all of human history, there have been no rules between nations because there is no super-national government to enforce them. (The only exceptions were when a single empire dominated multiple nations, and then there were still no rules to restrain empires.) In this condition, the only things that prevent nations from attacking each other are capacity and threat. Anarchy reigns.
After World War 2, America wanted something better. So we dusted of the League of Nations idea and tried again, this time with the United Nations, which was founded in 1945. But it wasn’t just the United Nations. A whole ecosystem of new international organizations was founded as part of this rules-based order, including the International Monetary Fund (founded in 1944), the World Bank (founded in 1944), the International Court of Justice (founded in 1945), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the precursor to the World Trade Organization, founded in 1947), and the World Health Organization (founded in 1948).
The core rationale for the rules-based order was to prevent the horror of war, especially world war. One of the key lessons of the First World War was that using a network of ad hoc alliances to keep the peace could backfire if a dispute between two small nations (like, say, someone shooting an archduke) led to a cascade of triggers that dragged every single faction into one giant war. One of the key lessons of the Second World War was the unique danger posed by totalitarian regimes like fascist Germany, fascist Italy, and imperialist Japan.
With these lessons from World War 1 and World War 2 in mind, the architects of the rules-based order relied o a whole web of organizations. This makes sense. The United Nations is a quasi world government, but without any actual enforcement power it’s the least useful and least important of the institutions in the rules-based order. Other organizations–like the World Health Organization–with clear goals that benefitted cooperation between nations were much more important because they fostered voluntary cooperation between nations. The hope was that a network of voluntary organizations with practical benefit would knit nations together. But what kind of nations? Liberal ones, that is, nations that respected basic human rights, including civil rights (like free speech and freedom of religion) and economic rights (like private property and free markets).
Basically: liberal nations won World War 2, and they tried to use liberalism to build a more peaceful and stable world in the aftermath, including rebuilding Germany and Japan into liberal nations that could participate in that rules-based order.
In terms of securing peace among its members, the rules-based order has been wildly successful. Liberal democracies don’t go to war with each other, and at least part of the reason for this is that liberal democracies agreed to live by the principles and within the institutional framework of the rules-based order.
But from the very beginning the rules-baed order has had a secondary objective: survive a standoff against totalitarian powers in the First Cold War. Here, too, it was ultimately successful. Some of the credit goes to the nature of nuclear weapons: nobody could afford an all-out confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. But that only explains the lack of an all-out war. Why did the US-led West win? Because liberalism and the liberal order led to far greater prosperity. Ultimately the West outpaced nations with Marxist-derived ideologies economically and scientifically and, as a result, politically and militarily as well.
This, then, is the case for globalism: it’s a proven way for liberal democracies to live in peace with each other and to secure their safety through the prosperity that comes from that peace.
Anti-Globalist Populism
The institutions that the rules-based order relies on have become corrupt politically, economically, and ideologically. During the Covid pandemic, it became painfully obvious that the ostensibly science-based World Health Organization had been compromised by the Chinese Communist Party. What good is a World Health Organization that puts the political interests of an authoritarian regime ahead of health? Not much.
The working class is also struggling, both in America and throughout the West, and there’s a widespread belief that international agreements between liberal democracies are to blame. Instead of serving the interests of all, have the economic institutions have been warped by the interests of the super-rich. The starkest example of this is China shock, which is the idea that giving China access to the World Trade Organization in 2001 had a direct and catastrophic impact on American manufacturing. The supposed theory behind allowing China access to the WTO was that it would help the nation to liberalize economically and then politically, bringing China into rules-baed order. That did not happen, meaning America’s workers paid a heavy price for, at best, a dumb political gamble and, at worst, an outright money-grab.
The most outrageous instances of corrupt globalist organizations are not political or economic, but ideological. Activists in wealthy nations have a sordid history of leveraging “aid” as an instrument of cultural imperialism, imposing views that are controversial in their own nations on developing nations, such as when United Nations agencies enforce pro-choice policies on African nations. But the most egregious examples are when arrogant cultural imperialism combines with local politics, as when USAID ended up overseeing the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Peruvian women.
We are living through a crisis of institutional credibility, much of which is self-inflicted. The rules-based order depends on institutions, so the crisis of institutional credibility has infected the rules-based order itself. The populists have a point. Perhaps the rules-baed order was never really that useful, and it was just the threat of annihilation that kept the First Cold War cold. Even if the rules-based order had a role to play, the First Cold War is over, so maybe the rules-based order has served its purpose.
I hope I have done OK on the ideological Turing test and given a good–if brief–overview of the populist anti-globalist position. In truth, it’s not hard to do because the criticisms are serious and real. But now comes the hard part: if the criticisms are real, what should we do about them?
Reform or Revolt?
When something is broken, you eventually have to decide to fix it or get rid of it. And I do believe that the rules-based order is broken, if for no other reason than that it has lost the confidence and trust of so many of the citizens of the liberal democracies that comprise it. So… now what?
The populist anti-globalists want to get rid of it. To some extent, they might even deny that the rules-based order was ever a real thing. Instead, they might argue, it was all pretext and illusion. The only real thing all along was power.
Either way–whether we’re getting rid of something real or dispelling an illusion–what comes next is clear: a world divided into spheres of influence. This is why the anti-globalists are willing to accept Putin’s rationale for invading Ukraine and see it largely as America’s fault. Russia is a big, powerful nation. In a world ruled by anarchy the only rule is power. And according to that rule big, powerful nations get their spheres of influence. If you fail to recognize this fact, that’s on you.
From this perspective, it is the United States and NATO who are at fault for Putin invading Ukraine because, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have expanded ever eastward, allowing countries that ought to be in Russia’s sphere of influence to escape: the Baltics, Poland, Hungary, etc. That’s bad enough. But Ukraine? It’s literally on Russia’s border. Refusing to rule out Ukraine joining NATO one day violated Russia’s sphere of influence, and if you poke the bear whatever happens next is your fault.
But if you think that’s bad, look at Asia. Some of our key allies and economic partners–S. Korea, Japan, and Taiwan–are deep, deep within what should geographically be the sphere of influence of the People’s Republic of China. The best possible reading you could put on Trump’s foreign policy is a realistic apprehension that Ukraine isn’t worth fighting for when we have a much, much greater rival in the PRC and far greater exposure in their sphere of influence.
America has an isolationist heritage. George Washington famously argued against permanent treaties, “entangling alliances”, and for most of our history we stayed out of world affairs. What’s so wrong with returning to that world, and embracing a narrow view of the national interest? If the institutions of the rules-based order aren’t working for America, why should we work for them?
That, as I understand it, is the anti-globalist take on Trump’s foreign policy. It might not sound good, but it’s a return from idealism to realism.
Except it’s not actually realistic at all.
The rules-based order may have been born out of an idealistic desire to avoid conflict, especially between liberal democracies, but the grueling decades of the Cold War showed that it’s greatest strength was uniting liberal democracies against the threat of authoritarian regimes. Earlier in this post, I referred to the “First Cold War”. That wasn’t accidental. We are now in a Second Cold War, whether we want to be or not.
There have always been two sides to the rules-based order. On the inside, the rules worked because we all agreed to follow them. Conflicts between liberal democracies were worked out through diplomacy. This might not be because the rules-based order was so wonderful. It might have been because the outside threat of the Soviet Union forced greater cooperation, but even so: the institutions and norms of the rules-based order facilitated that cooperation, allowing for historically astonishing levels of prosperity within the rules-based order.
But outside the rules-based order? That’s the Hobbesian hellscape, and the only thing that matters, ultimately, is force. What’s remarkable is that the rules-based order so readily understood and adapted to that reality. Peace within the rules-based order has always been maintained through adherence to the rules. Peace between the rules-based order and its outside rivals has always been maintained through deterrence. For all its idealism, the rules-based order was impressively–and sometimes even cynically–realistic when it came to is own survival.
That’s why this crisis could only have arisen after the end of the First Cold War. The institutions of the rules-baed order were propped up, to a great extent, by external threat. Without that threat they grew soft, corrupt, and captured.
The question we have before us, then, is whether we–as Americans–would like to fight the Second Cold War alongside the other liberal democracies of the world… or an our own. The answer, if we’re being realistic, is obvious. Even though I concede that it is broken, we should not throw out the rules-based order. We should fix it. Because in the coming decades, we’re going to need it as we haven’t for decades.
Salvaging the Rules-Based Order
I wrote the prior three sections of this post on Saturday, Feb 22. Then today, on Monday Feb 24, I learned that the United States had voted with Russia against a Ukrainian resolution to condemn the invasion and call for Russia to withdraw from Ukrainian territory along with countries like Belarus and North Korea.
The one silver lining to this national disgrace is that it affords us a unique moment of clarity. Nate Oman wrote a great piece articulating the origin of the Western alliance that became NATO, including the observation that:
Far from Making America Great Again™, this makes America less powerful, less influential, and makes the world less friendly to our interests. If our allies believe that we will side with aggressive dictators against countries that we have supported, that we will stand with Vladimir Putin rather than the countries of NATO, and that we cannot be trusted to oppose aggressive wars of conquest, they will not trust us. If we do that, they shouldn’t trust us. And that lack of trust means that we will be less powerful, less able to safeguard American interests, and ultimately less able to make the world a better place. It is not in America’s interest to reward those who launch wars of conquest. It is not in America’s interest to live in a multipolar world of regional hegemons rather than the rules-based system birthed by the Atlantic Charter. It is not in America’s interests to side with dictators who are invading democracies.
If we are to salvage the rules-based order, now is a good time to start. The rules-based order is a proud American accomplishment, the crown jewel of our finest hour in World War 2. For almost a century it has served our interests and the interests of freedom-loving people around the world. That, after all, is one of the key insights of liberalism: life does not have to be a zero sum game. Today, the rules-based order is in need of reform. It has been neglected–such as with European nations free-riding on American defense expenditures–and that neglect has allows special interests to hijack the institutions for their own purposes (like the WHO and the WTO) so that ordinary Americans do not benefit from it as they should.
But now is not the time to throw the rules-based order away! If we do, we will splinter the liberal democracies just at a time when the rising axis of authoritarianism–Russian, China, North Korea, and Iran–is growing most dangerous. For our safety, for our prosperity, and for the freedom afforded to all citizens of liberal democracies and especially the oldest constitutional republic in the world, the time has come to recommit to a reformed rules-based order.
I really believe that is what will happen. Eventually. The question is how long it will take for us to rediscover the lessons learned by the Greatest Generation, and how much we will have to suffer before we reclaim their legacy as our own.