Welcome back to 1945 The liberal world order was always a myth

As opposed to the actually existing one, the mythical “1945 order” began, we can say, at some point between 1989 and 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. As John Mearsheimer correctly observes, “’the Cold War order’, which is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a ‘liberal international order’, was neither liberal nor international”, instead being a bounded order, limited to Western Europe and North America, within a bipolar global system contested between the United States and the Soviet Union. From its inception, Nato had very little interest in the advancement of liberal democracy which has, from the Nineties onwards, become its ostensible purpose: Salazar’s Portugal, Greece’s junta and Turkey’s various military putschists were all valued members at one time or another. All of them were less democratic and more authoritarian than Trump. Peace in Europe — if not in Asia, which witnessed millions of deaths in the struggle between the two political poles for dominance — was not the natural product of a liberal democracy guarded by the great Western victor of the Second World War, but preserved simply by the nuclear standoff between the two rival empires.

Indeed, we can go further than Mearsheimer, deconstructing the Second World War myth so sacred to British institutional memory — no doubt because it recasts Britain’s subordination to the American Empire as an act of Christ-like sacrifice. In the vulgar version of the myth, the great contest was a struggle for liberal democracy, and indeed the Allied eventual victory was proof of its superiority over rival political systems — an otherwise perceptive British politician told me just this, with complete conviction, the other week. Yet Stalin’s Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of the fighting, was hardly a benign liberal democracy, and Churchill was correct in viewing the alliance as one with the devil, borne of amoral necessity. Even the Poland Britain and France went to war to defend, in 1939, was not a liberal democracy but an authoritarian military regime, typical of the Central Europe of the time. Yet it was viewed as no less worthy of support for this. Yet by the standards of today, Poland’s Right-wing paternalist regime of 1939, happy to harass Jews and annex the territory of its weaker neighbours, would be the object of liberal enmity rather than support.

Today’s political taboos simply cannot be mapped onto the actually existing world which birthed them: following the fall of France, Britain’s only extant ally, for a time, was Greece’s military dictatorship; and following Greece’s liberation, Churchill made sure to oust the country’s effective Communist resistance and replace it with a Right-wing regime, which employed Nazi collaborators to hunt down the wartime resistance. Like many Western conservatives, Churchill had admired Italian fascism and Mussolini — “one of the most wonderful men of our time” — and regarded Italy’s late alliance with Germany as a tragedy. Indeed, even the Britain and France of 1945, which together ruled vast swathes of what is today called the Global South through non-democratic and coercive means, would be far beyond the pale of 21st-century liberalism.

At its simplest, the Second World War was won by the combined industrial might of two great land empires, the United States and the Soviet Union, whose power was the result of the preceding two centuries of continental expansion, experienced as dispossession and genocide by the native inhabitants. It is perhaps natural that this simple truth is too much for liberals to bear as the foundation of their political system, and that a gentler and more noble myth was required to take its place. Yet the result is that the actual world constructed by the victorious Allies of 1945 — the world to which we have in many ways returned — is paradoxically an alien and hateful one to today’s shrill defenders of the post-Cold War “1945 order”. Trump’s mass deportation orders would be comprehensible to Eisenhower, the architect of both the D-Day victory and Operation Wetback; the attitude of today’s American liberals would not. It is hard to see how Musk is more objectionable a rocket scientist than Wernher von Braun, other than through liberal radicalisation in the intervening decades. It is the supposed destroyers of the 1945 order who instead retain its pragmatic values.

The Ukraine war, and the Gaza war, each in their own way define the terminal point of the post-Cold War 1945 myth. At the peak of Ukraine’s military successes, in 2022, it was commonplace to hear the claim that the war was a fight for liberal democracy against authoritarianism, which Ukraine’s fragile democracy was predestined to win due to the inherent superiority of its political system. Three years on, this argument is rarely heard, for obvious reasons. Indeed we can say Ukraine’s looming defeat is largely the product of liberal democracy. Within a domestic dynamic fuelled largely by the liberal conspiracy theories of the 2016 election, Putin served as a metaphorical final-boss Trump to be defeated. In response, the Trumposphere adopted an exaggerated antipathy for Ukraine, wearing the sympathy for Putin they were tarred with as a badge of honour. As a result of America’s divided democracy, the Ukraine war swiftly mutated from a bipartisan cause into another battleground of its own internal conflict. Putin’s calculations on Ukraine’s capacity for organised resistance may have been faulty, but his assessment of Western democracy has proved entirely correct.

In 2022, despite America’s own record of invading countries to overthrow their regimes, or annexing territory from hostile rivals to award it to pet clients, Washington’s criticism of Russia’s actions in Ukraine could reasonably expect a fair hearing. But in 2024, as the world observes America’s shrugged posture of helplessness at the slaughter in Gaza, the moral high-ground shimmers far beyond Washington’s reach. The original sin of the actually existing 1945 order was invading other countries, violating their borders in pursuit of a messianic political vision. But this taboo rapidly became obsolete once America claimed the same right for itself. Instead, after 1989, as cultural historians have long noted, the Holocaust — only tangentially dealt with at Nuremberg — became “the supra-denominational passion story of late modernity”. And by explicitly tying the atrocity to contemporary conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, “Never Again” suddenly became the moral basis for America’s new empire, justifying military interventionism as long as a humanitarian principle could be invoked. 

Yet the human rights NGOs who provided moral justification for America’s wars against its rivals find themselves ignored and helpless when it comes to Gaza: the revealed principle of America’s liberal order is not that never again can war be waged against civilians, but that only Israel may do so. As in other aspects of politics, Israel presents itself as a dark, perhaps unconscious satire of America: that the war in Gaza helped turn liberal American voters away from the global order which claims their name is only fitting. Perhaps, indeed, America’s global liberal order helped undermine its domestic one. If the first time round Trump was dealt with as an aberration against the natural order of things, now it is the Biden administration that shows itself the aberration — a brief and largely failed interlude in the new world that has dawned.

For as Mearsheimer notes, the American global liberal order, which claimed the mantle of the 1945 victory to justify its imperial dominance, was “bound to fail”. The hyperglobalisation of capital it undertook detached the working- and middle-classes of the Western world from an economic and political regime which impoverished them; the equivalent hyperglobalisation of human beings reignited the West’s dormant nationalism through creating a sense of demographic threat. The messianic mission to reshape the world in America’s image overstretched and weakened the empire, while consolidating an alliance of rival major powers which now outmatches it. As expansionist and revisionist as any of the great 20th-century totalitarianisms, American liberalism searched the world for monsters to destroy and created them, just as domestically it fears fascists under the bed — while it rapidly creates them too.

If Trump were a fascist, we should surely welcome his isolationism. Instead, for American liberal hawks, the proof of his fascism is his desire not to militarily intervene in far-off lands. In its dying days, the Harris campaign deployed voter-repelling neoconservatives-turned-Never Trumpers like Liz Cheney — the overlap between these two categories is more or less exact — and suffered for it. The age of the liberal imperialist is over. It is only natural for its remaining hawks to tremor at the age that has just begun, which they themselves midwifed. But in truth, American foreign policy is bound to continue much as before: America’s options are now constrained by its dwindling power, rather than ideology. A cold war, and perhaps a military confrontation with China is destined by geopolitical logic, rather than the personalities of the rival contenders for the imperial throne. A painful peace settlement for Ukraine was coming whoever won the American election, just as, for all Trump’s outreach to Arab-American voters, his policy on Israel will differ only by dispensing with the Biden Administration’s facade of helpless angst.

Nevertheless, we should not lament the collapse of the global order America built after 1989: indeed, liberals themselves should welcome it. Just as the bipolar order of the Cold War world, by restraining liberalism’s inherent tendencies to radicalisation and hubris, made the Western world safe for a tempered and moderate liberalism, so may the multipolar world we have entered save liberals from their own excesses. Beset by confident rivals abroad, and by the disenchantment of their own voters at home, liberals will once again have to learn restraint. The post-Cold War order ultimately proved disastrous for American liberalism: a return to the actually existing order of 1945 may prove more congenial. Lammy’s newfound equanimity at a Trump White House may yet prove uncharacteristically astute.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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