Liberalism won’t survive 2025 Cold War ideologies are dead

Yet even still, “the Right” is, conceptually, an absolute mess. Much of what is novel in it is genuinely harmful, and presents huge risks of even worse political futures than those given to us by millenarian Liberalism. As Yeats saw it at a similar time of political flux, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” If it possesses any coherent, unifying purpose, the new Right consists merely of rolling back the liberal innovations of the Sixties onwards: and perhaps that is progress enough. Much of Trump’s initial appeal was that of the boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes, mockingly pointing out the nakedness of the West’s rulers. Had they taken the critique seriously — of their radical identity politics of race and gender, of their programme of economic self-destruction through a unilateral energy transition, of their commitment to an imaginary borderless Utopia in which the rest of the world dreams only of achieving its historic destiny as Western liberals — perhaps the destruction of their order would not be so total. The dying liberal order chose suicide through want not just of self-reflection but of pragmatism. And indeed, perhaps if the incoming order has a single defining characteristic, it is pragmatism rather than any coherent replacement ideology. Perhaps it is not just the great 20th century ideologies — fascism, communism, postwar liberalism — that are dead, but any all-consuming ideology at all.

The sudden and dramatic seizure of power by Syria’s former al-Qaeda faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is a moment of wider political significance than mere regional analysis assumes. Over the decade-long course of the country’s bloody civil war, the assumed end state for Syria was one or another totalising 20th century ideology — whether liberal democracy, Baathism, or Salafi jihadism was preferred aligning with the sympathies of the beholder. Yet instead the new power on the throne seems, so far, a purely pragmatic technocrat, a centralising moderniser closer to Lee Kuan Yew, Bukele or Mohammed Bin Salman than anything in either liberal or jihadist theories of governance. In this sense, al-Jolani is perhaps a bellwether of the coming post-ideological century. Simply put, the central political question is “If you were to found a new state in 2024, what would it look like?” Certainly, the 20th century liberal democratic model is no more attractive than the 20th century Baathist model. Perhaps, by its very nature, results-driven technocracy is non-liberal, even if it isn’t necessarily illiberal. Perhaps, the new Syria even offers glimpses of our own society’s future.

The 20th century liberal democratic model is going the same way as the great 20th century totalitarianisms it defined itself against. Yet — as reflected in liberal discourse where the assumption made is that politics is a binary choice between liberalism and fascism — liberals are still trapped in the 20th century, fighting ghosts, even as the world has already moved on. Applied to the international order, then, the conclusion — we must hope — of the war in Syria is a perfect example of this conceptual shift. Just a few years ago, the operating assumption that a stable conclusion to the Syrian war was really something within the West’s (which means America’s) power to bring. Instead, we have witnessed the opposite: rebel victory was brought by a group the West shuns, under US terror sanctions for perfectly valid reasons. The West’s purported end state in Syria, a rebel victory, was brought about by the West walking away from the problem, and conceding strategic defeat. Yet the relatively bloodless form of political transition witnessed in the past few weeks was also brought by the seeming strategic victors — the supposed resistance axis of Iran, Russia and Hezbollah — making the pragmatic decision to withdraw support from Assad, confident that they could maintain their interests in the new order.

For all the moralising discourse we’ve suffered on Syria over the past decade, the conflict was internally, a multipolar one, with multiple armed groups making pragmatic bargains and shifting alliances depending on their self-interested needs of the moment. That internal dynamic has now recapitulated itself in terms of the international order, with the pragmatic and so far mutually agreeable deal-making of regional powers presenting, if anything, a hopeful vision of multipolarity in action. What does all this mean for us, for Britain and for the West?

Just before Christmas, Robert Jenrick published a piece in The Telegraph arguing that “liberal interventionism is dead”, saying, explicitly, that “The experiment in liberal utopianism has proven to be a fantasy.” It is difficult to imagine a senior Conservative politician — and, surely, the next leader of the Tory party — making this case, and certainly not using this terminology, then seen as rather a fringe view within IR discourse, even during the last Trump administration. That Jenrick does so is a reflection not just of the manifold and obvious failures of liberal interventionism at the height of American imperial power, but also of the fact that its power has waned, we can assume, permanently — unless, like al-Sham, liberals wage a shock campaign of reconquest from their embattled stronghold.  Arguing, as Jenrick does, for Britain’s “Palmerstonian pursuit of our self-interest abroad” is a tentative glimpse of British foreign policy in this new multipolar order — something that would have sounded naughtily transgressive just a few years years is now the common sense worldview of a senior Tory writing for The Telegraph readership. That is how rapidly the world has changed.

Will the second coming of the Trump World Order be similarly pragmatic? On Ukraine, Trump’s likely aim of imposing a painful peace on the country, writing off its losing war, can certainly be framed as ruthlessly pragmatic. Yet, whether bullying humour or sincere, Trump’s rumblings of annexations and interventions in North America — of absorbing Canada and Greenland while imposing order on Mexico — are surely less so. Yet intimidating Canada and Denmark at least robs America’s Nato vassals of the comforting illusion they are partners instead of vassals: perhaps a pragmatic case can be made for establishing the ground rules of 21st-century international politics early on. The lanyard-wearing, security conference-attending clerisy of liberal Atlanticism now finds itself wedded to an order of purely homeopathic liberalism. Flanked from across both the Atlantic and the Channel by a Rightist surge whose form is still being defined, the changing political order will hit Whitehall’s ideologues hardest of all.

Perhaps, like Jolani, we should rethink our situation from first principles. If we could put every aspect of 21st-century Britain’s governance, individually, to a referendum, which parts would survive? The gap between the likely answers and the current reality explains British politics at this moment. It is sadly ironic that while Syria seems to be acquiring pragmatic, post-ideological governance led by al-Qaeda veterans, Britain is still ruled by the arcane processes and ideological fixations of zealots. As in France and Germany, now rendered ungovernable by the last ideological spasm of Left-liberalism, its total commitment to mass immigration and its consequences as a moral end in itself — its last irreducible principle when all other goals and aspirations have been abandoned —  will define British politics in the coming decades. European politics in the 2020s is largely the product of safe, orderly societies suddenly becoming not so; Americans, who are used to this lifestyle, thinking we’re being prissy about it; and European progressives, who are entirely America-brained provincials, are taking social cues from the imperial metropole rather than their own lived experience.

Yet it is the liberal argument, that such a dramatic and socially-disruptive course of action is both natural and desirable that now requires defending — the pragmatic case is simply that the experiment has been tried and, as many warned, failed. Slowly, then suddenly, the progressives became marginal reactionaries and the dissident Right, the sensible pragmatists. The fundamental demand of the British new Right, from which Conservative party and its allied thinktank-thought is now increasingly downstream, is a return to the Britain of the early Nineties: a hard reset to fix the bad coding newly written into the system. Yet, as it stands, the British state in 2024 appears to be an experiment in formulating an angry ethnic nationalism, by heightening competition for increasingly scarce resources. This is a dangerous path to travel: the pragmatic choice is simply to admit, and undo, the errors of past ideologues.

Yet no less than Starmer’s Labour Party, an increasingly isolationist holdout of a now-dead order, the Conservative Party is wedded to the past. Its choice of Badenoch, a leftover 2010s culture warrior seemingly self-exiled from party politics in search of ageless Tory principles to bear back down from the mountain, was a poor one. The British Right is now rapidly consolidating on a Cummings-Jenrick-Lowe platform, of data-driven questioning of bad governance, and urging the necessity of radical reform — with Starmer now signalling his own agreement. The previous model failed, but we live in a time of change: in Britain as in Syria, the people will tolerate experiments in governance that offer them prosperity, security and stability. The rigid ideological certainties of the 20th century did not serve us Europeans well. To survive the coming order, our political leadership should accept the luxury of pragmatism over fossilised principles that the dawning world order affords it.

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

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