Towards a New Liberal International Order
It is time for democratic countries to accept that the existing system is broken and that they must develop a new global security architecture.
I.
There’s a devastating civil war and vast humanitarian crisis unfolding in Sudan right now, and it barely makes the headlines. Since April 2023, a conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced more than ten million people. The UN has just declared a famine in western Sudan (in the Zamzam refugee camp), with the precipitating conditions “likely to persist during August–October 2024.” According to that report, Sudan faces the worst food crisis in its history, with 25.6 million people (half the population) suffering acute hunger. Heavy rainfall has damaged camps and other forms of shelter, increased the risk of disease (the Federal Ministry of Health declared a cholera outbreak in August), delayed aid deliveries, and even caused “widespread scorpion and snake infestations.”
Clementine Nkweta-Salami, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Sudan, says aid organisations urgently need “safe and unimpeded humanitarian access, including across borders and battle lines.” Thousands of tonnes of aid are stuck due to poor road conditions—a situation exacerbated by the fighting. “Shifting lines of conflict and the peak of the rains and flooding season,” the UN reports, “are aggravating an already challenging humanitarian access situation, where aid agencies are having to constantly negotiate and secure new routes for aid convoys.”
The RSF is a descendant of the Janjaweed militias responsible for the Darfur genocide perpetrated between 2003 and 2005. In Darfur today, the RSF has launched a new campaign of ethnic cleansing; terrorising civilians and expelling non-Arabs from the areas under its control. While the RSF doesn’t yet control the city of el-Fasher in Darfur, it has a heavy presence in the surrounding areas (including near Zamzam), which is making it difficult for civilians to escape or receive desperately needed assistance. The RSF has attacked and stolen from aid convoys, while the SAF isn’t allowing sufficient aid into areas controlled by the RSF. This means most of Darfur faces a severe lack of food and other forms of basic assistance, on top of the violence being visited upon civilians in the region.
Opening up and guarding routes for aid convoys—as well as protecting civilians at camps like Zamzam and across the country—should be a job for a UN peacekeeping force, but it’s hard to imagine the US, Russia, and China working together on the Security Council to authorise one. There’s a conspicuous lack of political will to address the crisis in Sudan—Western democracies are looking the other way, while regional powers and others are exploiting the situation as it deteriorates. The UAE is arming the RSF, while Iran backs the SAF. Meanwhile, the Economist reports: “The White House has been wary of upsetting the UAE because it needs Emirati support on Gaza. Britain and the EU have largely ignored the war.” During his final speech at the UN General Assembly, US president Joe Biden spared a couple of paragraphs for the atrocities, famine, and displacement in Sudan. But he did not call for the deployment of peacekeepers and refused to hold the UAE accountable, preferring instead to obliquely warn that the “world needs to stop arming the generals.”
This indifference and inaction is striking, given the potential consequences of the conflict. Beyond the catastrophic human toll, the war could make Sudan a haven for terrorists and transnational criminals, create a refugee crisis in Europe, increase Iranian and Russian influence in the region, and cause instability around the Horn of Africa (which would have significant consequences for international shipping and the global economy). The Economist summarises why the war in Sudan is being overlooked:
It is … a disorderly war for disorderly times. America, distracted by China, Gaza and Ukraine, its influence diluted by rising middle powers, is almost irrelevant. International norms, laws and arms embargoes are widely flouted. Institutions such as the UN Security Council and the African Union (AU) are failing dismally. Sudan may be a harbinger of future conflicts in an anarchic, multipolar world.
Amid resurgent great-power conflict, international institutions such as the UN (particularly the Security Council) have become increasingly dysfunctional. If major democratic countries like the United States and its European allies fail to put crises like the civil war in Sudan on the global agenda, those crises tend to deteriorate until they’re so destabilising that they can no longer be ignored. In the meantime, other countries sweep into the vacuum. Sudan hasn’t just attracted opportunistic interventions from the UAE and Iran—Egypt has provided Turkish drones to the SAF, Eritrea is training SAF-aligned militias, and Russia has been involved in the conflict on both sides. Although the Wagner Group initially sent surface-to-air missiles to the RSF, Russia is now negotiating with the SAF to build a navy base near Port Sudan in exchange for “unrestricted qualitative military aid.”
This is the sort of exploitative and lawless international system that naturally emerges in the chaos of a multipolar world. Such a world would be dangerous enough if the largest European conflict since World War II wasn’t raging in Ukraine, or if the United States wasn’t on the verge of reelecting an isolationist authoritarian who wants to withdraw from NATO and surrender to Vladimir Putin before he even takes office. Or if China wasn’t ruled by the most powerful totalitarian ruler since Mao—a ruler who is fixated on conquering Taiwan and undermining the liberal-democratic world.
Institutions like the UN are not capable of meeting the challenges of multipolarity and revived great-power conflict. The dreams that seemed realisable at the end of the Cold War—such as what looked like an unstoppable global march toward liberal democracy—didn’t come true. The idea that governments could eventually agree on certain values such as universal human rights and the rule of law has so far proven to be a fantasy. There’s no such thing as a set of international laws universally accepted by all governments, and even if this were the case, there would be no way to enforce those laws outside the power of individual states.
None of this means the liberal international order is dead, but it does mean this order must be reimagined for the global threats that exist today. The authoritarian world has no interest in upholding international rules around issues like aggression or human rights. Just as China, Iran, and North Korea have all backed Russia’s war in Ukraine, autocracies ruthlessly pursue their own interests in places like Sudan with no regard for international law or human welfare.
However, this doesn’t mean it’s every dictator for himself. In her latest book, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, the historian Anne Applebaum illuminates the connections between a network of authoritarian rulers who aren’t bound by ideology or geographical proximity, but who support one another on the basis of their shared hostility towards the law-bound democratic world. There’s no natural connection between, say, Iran and Venezuela or Russia and Zimbabwe, but these states have a shared interest in undermining the United States and its allies, evading sanctions, and suppressing democratic sentiment among their populations. A shared contempt for the liberal international order creates strange alliances—Iran helps Venezuela develop its oil and petrochemical industries; North Korea sends millions of artillery shells to Russia; and China enables Russia to circumvent sanctions with drastically increased economic cooperation.
Over the coming years, the divide between the democratic and authoritarian worlds is likely to widen. The CCP explicitly regards values and institutions like democracy, universal human rights, and media independence as the main threats to its regime. Russia and China have partnered in an effort to make the world less reliant on the US dollar. The economic split over the war in Ukraine—in which countries like India continue doing business with Russia while the West tightens sanctions and seeks to isolate Moscow—is a sign of what’s to come. Further economic decoupling will be accompanied by divergence on issues like human rights—countries that want to maintain good relations with Beijing won’t speak out about the industrial-scale abuse of the Uyghurs or aggression towards Taiwan. Autocracies will continue to close ranks. And the chances of addressing crises like the one in Sudan with existing international institutions will continue to diminish.
It’s time for the liberal democratic world to recognise that many international institutions are no longer capable of serving their original purpose—from addressing humanitarian crises to holding leaders accountable when they commit human-rights abuses, menace their neighbours, and violate international law. Democracies can’t abandon the liberal international order, but they should recommit to the liberal part of that concept. If this can’t be done through existing institutions like the UN, new institutions will be needed.
II.
The system of alliances and institutions established after World War II helped to eliminate war in Western Europe, defeat the Soviet Union, and facilitate an unprecedented era of economic prosperity and democratisation. This system is often described as the rules-based international order, as it attempted to substitute a set of international laws, norms, and institutions for the great-power politics that had organised the world up until that point. But the Cold War was a multi-decade reminder that great-power competition couldn’t be wished away. It wasn’t until the collapse of the Soviet Union that a truly global rules-based order became conceivable.
Throughout the 1990s, a new set of norms emerged around human rights, state sovereignty, and global security. After two years of war in Bosnia, NATO received UN authorisation to intervene and force a settlement. The Rwandan genocide horrified the international community, and the failure to stop the killing was widely seen as a tragic mistake. The genocide in Srebrenica also had a galvanising effect on the liberal-democratic world and the leaders of international institutions like the UN. In 1999, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan cited these atrocities when he argued that “traditional notions of sovereignty can no longer do justice to the aspirations of peoples everywhere to attain their fundamental freedoms.”
Annan believed the tension between interventionism and state sovereignty would be a defining issue of the 21st century. He argued that the UN would have to “forge unity behind the principle that massive and systematic violations of human rights—wherever they may take place—should not be allowed to stand.” It is, he said, “essential that the international community reach consensus” on these interventions, and he argued that the “Security Council, the body charged with authorising force under international law” must be “able to rise to the challenge.” But what can the Security Council do when one of its permanent members, Russia, is the state responsible for waging an expansionist war on its neighbour?
Annan’s speeches and reports from the late 1990s and early 2000s are time capsules from a very different world. The Berlin Wall had fallen just a decade earlier. It was a time when President Bill Clinton looked forward to a liberal-democratic China that would be “stable, open, and non-aggressive, that embraces free markets, political pluralism, and the rule of law, that works with us to build a secure international order.” This was before the invasion of Iraq, which did so much damage to the new norms around interventionism—norms that were later consolidated as the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. It was a time when former Soviet countries like the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland were joining NATO, and the alliance was even attempting to establish closer relations with Russia. After 11 September, Putin was one of the first world leaders to offer President George W. Bush his condolences, and Russia agreed to the establishment of an American military presence in Central Asia.
Annan believed states would eventually be able to find “unity in the pursuit of such basic [UN] Charter values as democracy, pluralism, human rights, and the rule of law.” He thought humanitarian action could be based on “legitimate and universal principles,” and he expected that the Security Council would be the “defender of the common interest.” He didn’t realise that a permanent member of the Security Council would one day launch the largest conflict on European soil since World War II. Nor did he realise that relations between the Western powers and another permanent member, China, would reach a multi-decade low point by 2024.
With the Security Council paralysed by the mutual hostility of its members, are there other international institutions capable of defending human rights and holding those who violate those rights accountable? Weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—the highest judicial authority at the UN—ordered Russia to stop all military operations in the country. Russia was undeterred. A year after the war began, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Putin. The suspect remains at large.
In May, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan requested arrest warrants for three top Hamas officials: Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh. Khan’s request stated that these officials bear criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the 7 October atrocities in Israel. Khan also requested warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant, arguing that the IDF has intentionally targeted civilians and used starvation as a weapon of war. This request was a transparently political manoeuvre and implied a moral and legal equivalence between a genocidal terrorist organisation and the democratic government defending itself against that organisation. It has been nearly four months since Khan’s request, and the ICC panel of judges responsible for issuing the warrants has yet to make a decision. This stands in contrast to the court’s decision to issue a warrant for Putin, which was made after less than a month of deliberations.
When Khan announced his warrant requests for Hamas and Israeli officials, he said: “Today we once again underline that international law and the laws of armed conflict apply to all. No foot soldier, no commander, no civilian leader—no one—can act with impunity.” The problem with this stirring paean to the rule of law and universal jurisdiction is that ICC rulings don’t, in fact, prevent dictators and terrorists from acting with impunity. Putin’s arrest warrant has been outstanding for a year and a half. Two of the three Hamas officials named in Khan’s request, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, will never see the inside of a courtroom because they were killed by Israeli forces.
Other attempts to bring international law to bear on the war in Gaza have fizzled. When South Africa brought a case against Israel at the ICJ, it called upon the court to order a halt to Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Although the ICJ didn’t order a total ceasefire, the court demanded in May that Israel “immediately halt its military offensive” in Rafah. This demand went unheeded and the Rafah offensive went ahead as planned. Even if the ICC judges rule against Netanyahu, we won’t see him hauled off to the Hague anytime soon.
The ICC and the ICJ have no means of enforcement outside the cooperation of governments around the world. Neither Israel nor the United States is a member of the ICC, which means that neither would have any obligation to abide by an arrest warrant for Netanyahu should one be issued. Even when states are members of the ICC, this is no guarantee that they will take action to enforce its rulings. In 2015, when Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir was wanted by the ICC for crimes against humanity and genocide, he visited South Africa. The government decided not to arrest him. Putin recently visited Mongolia, which as a member of the ICC is obliged to take him into custody, but the government refused to do so. The EU, Ukraine, and Human Rights Watch urged the Mongolian government not to allow Putin into the country—or to arrest him upon his arrival—but the Kremlin expressed “no worries” about the trip, which went smoothly.
One form of redress when countries refuse to abide by ICJ rulings is referring them to the UN Security Council—where Russia holds permanent veto power. Tamás Hoffmann is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Legal Studies, and he observes that, “Mongolia will most certainly be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court for breaching its duty of cooperation.” But he goes on to acknowledge that “there are no serious consequences, such as sanctions, for the offending country.”
Despite all the high-flown rhetoric about how “nobody is above the law,” one harsh reality of the international system is that power must often be checked by power. The Nuremberg trials in 1945–46 led to the conviction of many Nazi war criminals, which was a pivotal moment in the development of international law. But the trials were only possible after the total Allied victory in World War II. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was the first international war-crimes tribunal since Nuremberg and Tokyo (1946–48), and it highlights the same problem.
The ICTY successfully indicted and convicted several of the most notorious war criminals during the conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s, including Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić—Bosnian Serb commanders who directed the genocide of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. In May 1999, Slobodan Milošević became the first sitting head of state to be indicted by an international criminal court. Karadžić was sentenced to forty years in prison, Mladić was sentenced to life, and Milošević died of a heart attack in his prison cell awaiting the conclusion of his trial (which was widely expected to result in a conviction).
Like the ICC and the ICJ, the ICTY had no enforcement powers of its own. But because the tribunal’s first indictment was issued in November 1994—a year before the NATO intervention in Bosnia brought the war to an end—there were powerful forces on the ground to round up war criminals and bring them to justice. Karadžić and Mladić were indicted just a month before the US-brokered Dayton agreement (which was enforced by NATO peacekeepers) formally ended the war. After the alliance created the conditions for the ICTY to do its work by forcing a political settlement, the NATO-led Stabilisation Force (SFOR) in Bosnia arrested dozens of suspected war criminals. Similarly, Milošević was indicted a month before the Kosovo War came to an end—another outcome determined by NATO airpower.
The most successful examples of international law in practice were enabled by hard power. And when hard power wasn’t used effectively (or at all), the consequences were devastating. The failure of the international community to stop the Rwandan genocide when it was taking place—which former President Bill Clinton describes as his greatest mistake—was a catalyst for the new norms around state sovereignty, interventionism, and international law in the 1990s. But if the crisis in Sudan is any indication, the world has forgotten what it learned in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide.
While the fighting in Rwanda was already over when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was established, the tribunal was created by the UN Security Council—which is impossible when it comes to, say, Russian war crimes today. And the competition between the great powers at the UN makes cooperation on urgent crises like the civil war in Sudan inconceivable. Now that there is a deepening split within the UN between the authoritarian and democratic worlds, it’s harder than ever to imagine the establishment of a robust, consistent, and enforceable system of international law. This is why it’s time for democratic countries to accept that the existing system is broken and that they must develop alternatives.
III.
In the early optimistic days of the liberal international order, it seemed possible that states around the world would eventually converge on certain rights and responsibilities. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been signed by 193 countries, and it asserts that every citizen has a “right to life, liberty and security”; is entitled to “equal protection of the law”; and has “freedom of thought, conscience and religion.” But central elements of the Universal Declaration are now viewed as subversive expressions of Western hegemony by major powers like China and Russia, as well as a long list of smaller states—from Venezuela to Syria to Zimbabwe.
As Applebaum explains in Autocracy, Inc., these states are actively opposed to the liberal international order that was built after World War II. The leaders of autocratic countries don’t want to be bound by the standards set by that order’s founding documents and principles, because it would mean committing themselves to free and fair elections, institutional constraints such as the rule of law, and other curbs on their personal power. However, these leaders cynically present their opposition to these norms and institutions in high-minded language about respecting “sovereignty,” opposing Western “imperialism” and “hegemony,” and so on. And they’re formalising this resistance to the liberal international order through institutions like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the BRICS alliance—originally an acronym meant to capture the economic rise of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, but which has come to reflect a growing movement to counter what’s regarded as the Western global order.
The battle lines in the long worldwide conflict between democracy and authoritarianism are clearer now than at any point since the Cold War. Democratic countries can’t keep hoping that existing international institutions are sufficient to help them resist authoritarianism and address the political and economic challenges of the 21st century.
Democratic governments have taken some steps in the right direction. Biden made the defence of democracy a goal of his presidency—not just in the United States, but globally. The Biden administration has held several democracy summits which focus on “strengthening democratic governance, protecting human rights, and advancing the fight against corruption.” Biden correctly argues that the world is in the middle of a “battle between democracy and autocracy,” and he has always recognised that the most important front in this battle is the war in Ukraine. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States has allocated US$107 billion to the Ukrainian government. During this period, Biden reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to eventually welcoming Ukraine into NATO, and he has overseen a significant expansion of the alliance with the accession of Finland and Sweden.
When Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for president, she emphasised the “enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny.” Unlike Donald Trump, who would immediately surrender to Putin, abandon the United States’ European partners, and perhaps even withdraw from NATO, Harris promised to “stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.” If Harris defeats Trump, she should go even further than Biden and lead an effort to formalise the de facto alliance that already exists between the world’s democracies. This doesn’t just mean reaffirming the United States’ commitment to NATO, increasing support for Ukraine, and renewing commitments to America’s East Asian allies. It means starting the process of creating international institutions that will embrace and defend the liberal-democratic values that authoritarian countries are bent on destroying.
Jeffrey Herf
This isn’t a new idea—it can be traced back at least to Immanuel Kant, who argued for a “federation of free states” in his 1795 book Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. Kant condemned the “lip-service that every state pays to the idea of law” and observed that “states don’t plead their cause in a law-court; their only way of bringing a suit is by war.” However, Kant believed it was possible for a group of states that accepted the concept of a “law of nations” to secure what he called perpetual peace. President Woodrow Wilson was heavily influenced by Kant, and he originally argued that “only the free peoples of the world can join the League of Nations.” But while the League ultimately had many unfree members, the United States never joined—the main reason it was doomed to fail.
There have been many proposals for an alliance of democracies. In 2000, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and Polish foreign minister Bronisław Geremek founded the Community of Democracies in Warsaw. In 2004, Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay published an influential article that made the case for an “Alliance of Democratic States.” In recent years, former NATO secretary general and Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former British prime minister Boris Johnson, and US secretary of state Antony Blinken have all called for an alliance of democracies.
Many of the problems that advocates of a democratic alliance have long sought to solve have become more urgent in recent years. When US senator John McCain proposed a league of democracies during the 2008 US presidential election, he said it could “act where the UN fails to act, to relieve human suffering in places like Darfur.” McCain could have repeated those exact words a decade and a half later, as Darfur is once again the scene of ethnic cleansing and a neglected humanitarian calamity. The tragedy in Sudan is a glimpse at what a postliberal international order would look like—an anarchic order in which countries feel emboldened to flagrantly violate or ignore human rights and international law in pursuit of their own interests.
Another product of the postliberal international order is the Syrian Civil War, a conflict that has lasted for over thirteen years, left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead, and displaced more than thirteen million people—a refugee crisis that contributed to the rise of populist nationalism in Europe. Russian forces played a key role in keeping Bashar al-Assad in power by establishing air superiority and carrying out relentless airstrikes—including many that directly targeted civilian infrastructure, a harbinger of what was to come in Ukraine. Iran was heavily involved in Syria as well, and Tehran forged closer ties with Moscow during the war. Russia and Iran had different objectives in Syria, but they both had an interest in defeating the Western-backed Syrian opposition and preventing a popular uprising from unseating a friendly government.
In 2013, Putin wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled, “A Plea for Caution from Russia.” The article was ostensibly a call for multilateralism and restraint in foreign policy, particularly as the United States and other Western powers weighed the possibility of intervention in Syria. Putin celebrated the veto power granted to permanent members of the Security Council: “The profound wisdom of this has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades.” He declared that American involvement in Syria could “throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.” He warned that “civilian casualties are inevitable, including the elderly and children.” He continued:
We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today’s complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos. The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not. Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.
Six months after Putin delivered this lecture in the pages of the New York Times, he invaded and annexed Crimea—an act of aggression that inaugurated a long proxy war in eastern Ukraine, and which presaged the invasion of the entire country in early 2022. Two years after Putin sanctimoniously urged the United States to stay out of Syria, Russian aircraft were bombarding Syrian civilians in one of the most lawless and destructive air campaigns of the 21st century. It’s no wonder Putin is so fond of his permanent veto on the Security Council—Russia has vetoed seventeen UN resolutions on Syria that would have facilitated the delivery of humanitarian aid because those resolutions didn’t authorise Russian military intervention.
Putin’s cynical embrace of international law followed by a decade-long spree of aggression and atrocity is a perfect encapsulation of why the UN and other institutions aren’t up to the challenges of modern global governance. Instead of serving as a check on authoritarian aggression, these institutions often enable it.
IV.
Despite all the talk about a rising China and greater authoritarian cooperation, the democratic world is still far wealthier and more powerful than its adversaries. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are often referred to as a new “authoritarian axis,” but the United States and its allies vastly exceed these countries economically and militarily. The combined GDP of the G7 is nearly US$49 trillion—2.3 times higher than that of the authoritarian axis. Total NATO defence expenditures will be over US$1.5 trillion in 2024—more than three times greater than those of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran combined.
But none of this means that the democratic world should be complacent. According to the annual Freedom in the World report published by Freedom House, countries with aggregate declines in political freedom have “outnumbered those with gains every year for the past 18 years.” These declines include mature democracies like the United States, which failed to have a peaceful transition of power on 6 January 2021—a process that had been the foundation of American democracy for 224 years.
During a series of lectures in Vienna in 2017, the historian Stephen Kotkin argued that the West must confront two major realities. The first is that the corrosion of democratic norms and institutions poses a greater threat to liberal democracies than any challenge from the outside. This is why states like Russia have invested so heavily in disinformation campaigns intended for Western audiences—campaigns that exploit existing cultural and political schisms. The most recent example of this strategy is Russia’s state broadcaster RT paying millions of dollars to influential right-wing influencers including Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, and Benny Johnson through an astroturf media organisation called Tenet. All three of these commentators are products of the shift towards populist nationalism in the United States, so they’re intensely opposed to aid for Ukraine. The Russian government didn’t need to give them a “line”—it appears that they didn’t even know they were receiving funding from Moscow—it just needed to subsidise the work they were already doing.
Cathy Young
Kotkin’s second point is that the “West is the greatest sphere of influence that has ever been constituted.” The term “sphere of influence” typically refers to individual states, but Kotkin expands this definition to the entire liberal-democratic world. He argues that the Western sphere of influence has grown because it represents universal values and institutions that have proven to be successful in many different countries:
I can tell you what the West is about. It’s about markets, private property, prosperity, open societies, free economy … liberal constitutional order, and democracy. … The West means nothing other than that. It’s not a geographical term because Japan was able to join that sphere of influence. And it joined only on those terms, the same way that Eastern Europe had to qualify to join the West.
Kotkin recognises that the liberal international order has been the greatest engine of stability, prosperity, and democratisation since World War II. But he also reminds democratic leaders that there’s “no escape” from geopolitics. While it may have seemed like great-power competition was a relic of a bygone era in the years following the Cold War, the past two decades have disabused Western leaders of that notion. Germany was for many years committed to the idea that economic engagement with Russia would eventually normalise relations between the two historic rivals—an illusion that was finally shattered by the war in Ukraine. German chancellor Olaf Scholz announced his country’s “Zeitenwende” (turning point) after the invasion, which means abandoning the country’s historic neutrality and overseeing what he calls “tectonic shifts in Germany’s security and defence policy.” Germany will spend two percent of its GDP on defence this year, and Berlin is second only to the United States in providing military aid for Ukraine.
This is a trend across NATO. While defence expenditures in NATO Europe and Canada only increased by 2.5 percent in 2021, they’re projected to surge by almost eighteen percent this year. Just six countries met the NATO defence-spending target of two percent in 2021, but this number has nearly quadrupled to 23. It’s difficult to imagine any of these countries going back to the pre-2022 status quo for a very long time, as the democratic world now realises that the coordinated use of hard power is the only way to check authoritarian aggression. The UN can condemn Russia all it wants, just as the ICC can issue arrest warrants and the ICJ can demand a halt to the war. But the only way to prevent a Russian victory in Ukraine and deter Moscow from future aggression is by continuing to arm and support Ukraine.
The days of Putin getting space in the New York Times to reproach the democratic world about the importance of international law are over. Russia, China, and other autocracies know they’re on one side, just as the United States and its democratic allies know they’re on the other. Democracies have a shared interest in confronting authoritarianism everywhere, and they need institutions that enable them to do so.
This means the creation of a new global security architecture. If China were to invade Taiwan tomorrow, would the United States and its partners be able to deliver military aid as effectively as NATO has done in Ukraine? It’s no wonder that former Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen called for “democratic friends in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond, to discuss a framework to generate sustained and concerted efforts to maintain a strategic order that deters unilateral aggressive actions.” She highlighted the need for a global strategy that “clearly conveys our resolve to protect our democracies.” The democratic world also needs institutions able to collectively authorise the use of force in places like Syria and Sudan, which can’t be allowed to descend into chaos that authoritarian countries can exploit. The worsening conflict and humanitarian crisis in Sudan today demonstrates the failure of institutions like the UN to uphold the most basic principles of international law.
Democratic countries also need to be thinking strategically about how they can coordinate to challenge the economic influence of the most powerful authoritarian states. The global economic system has become increasingly bifurcated between the democratic and authoritarian worlds. China has already spent more than US$1 trillion on its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and it plans to spend trillions more—making it one of the largest global infrastructure projects in history. When Xi Jinping launched the BRI, one of his goals was to increase the use of Chinese currency and resist the United States’ growing influence in the region. Beijing is also using the BRI and other investments as a form of coercive diplomacy—Chinese debt-financing contracts often contain provisions which prevent governments from restructuring with the United States, the UK, and other “Paris Club” creditor nations. China uses its economic clout to pursue its political aims—just a month after breaking ties with Taiwan in 2022, Nicaragua joined the BRI.
Autocratic governments help each other circumvent sanctions, hide and move their wealth, and take part in a parallel global economic system that isn’t bound by liberal ideas about transparency or the rule of law. An alliance of democracies could use the collective economic strength of its members to counter these trends, while enabling democratic governments to more effectively collaborate on urgent issues like climate change, AI regulation, cybersecurity, and pandemic preparedness.
Finally, a global democratic alliance will have to focus on strengthening liberal institutions against the authoritarian onslaughts from within and without. Membership in the alliance could be contingent on countries meeting certain requirements on electoral accountability and transparency, the rule of law and judicial independence, freedom of expression and assembly, and other key indicators of good governance. These requirements could be similar to the standards on democracy, human rights, and the protection of minorities that countries must meet to join the EU—standards that can improve prospective members’ commitment to liberal values while functioning as a check on backsliding members like Hungary. The preamble to the North Atlantic Treaty states that NATO was “founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” However, NATO is a military alliance—not a political and economic institution. It’s also geographically bound, while an alliance of democracies would have to be a global project.
Turkey recently submitted its formal application to join the BRICS, which has created tension within NATO. Membership will be easy to secure, as the BRICS don’t have onerous standards for membership like the EU—Iran joined earlier this year, for instance. Turkey’s membership in NATO has long been a source of unease within the alliance—as well as a talking point for its critics. Beyond Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s anti-democratic behaviour, Ankara has a history of contempt for human rights—from the invasion of Cyprus to the abuse of the Kurds to the refusal to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. Turkey may well fail to qualify for membership in an alliance of democracies, which will force Erdoğan—who likes to think he can play all sides off against each other—to make a decision about the types of alliances he wants to maintain.
One advantage of generic authoritarianism is that it’s protean. It’s easier for authoritarian states to cooperate when they don’t have to subscribe to a single ideology like Soviet communism. That authoritarian states have been reduced to rapacity, gangsterism, and the naked pursuit of personal power is a testament to the enduring power of liberal democracy. The great ideological totalitarian systems of the twentieth century have collapsed, while the number of democracies in the world has surged since World War II (despite recent setbacks). This is because liberal democracy is the most resilient form of government in the long run. It’s capable of self-correcting, it offers citizens real forms of redress for their grievances, it’s bound by the rule of law (which facilitates economic growth through essential functions like contract enforcement), it creates the space for diversity and pluralism, and it gives citizens agency and respect instead of treating them like raw material that the regime can use or discard as it sees fit. There’s a reason immigration is one of the biggest political issues in many democracies today—hundreds of millions of people are desperate to live within their borders.
The liberal international order that has existed since World War II is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. The UN is an integral part of this order, and it has many successes to its credit: effective peacekeeping operations, critical support for refugees and other threatened populations, successful vaccination campaigns and other public-health initiatives, and major development programs in the most impoverished and war-torn parts of the world. The international tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda that preceded the establishment of the ICC succeeded in putting war criminals behind bars—including a former head of state.
But the liberal-democratic order has become increasingly dysfunctional since the turn of the century. Instead of serving as a check on aggression, the UN Security Council has been rendered useless by Russian and Chinese veto power. Institutions such as the UN Human Rights Council lost any shred of legitimacy long ago, as they give the worst human-rights abusers on the planet a platform to demonise other countries (particularly Israel) and masquerade as defenders of international law. Although there have been several remarkable victories for international law since the Cold War, institutions such as the ICJ and ICC lose credibility when they issue orders and arrest warrants that are simply ignored by their subjects. Despite the hard lessons of Bosnia, Rwanda, and many other man-made humanitarian disasters, the international “community” allows gross violations of human rights and the infliction of mass suffering to go unchecked in places like Syria and Sudan today.
An alliance of democracies wouldn’t replace existing international institutions, which could still be used as forums for collective action and dialogue. But democratic governments have allowed the international order to be manipulated and undermined by autocrats for too long. Authoritarian countries will continue to draw closer together because they have a shared interest in subverting the international order and clinging to power at the expense of their own citizens. But if the democratic world can summon the political will to forge a new global alliance, it will outlast its authoritarian rivals—just as it has many times before.
