Crisis of the Old Order - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 3

Today, the American-led liberal hegemonic order is troubled. Conflicts and controversies
have unsettled it. The most obvious crisis of this order unfolded during the George W. Bush
administration. Its controversial “war on terror,” invasion of Iraq, and skepticism about mul-
tilateral rules and agreements triggered a global outpouring of criticism. Anti-Americanism
spread and gained strength. Even old and close allies started to question the merits of living
in a world dominated by a unipolar America. This sentiment was expressed in a particularly
pointed fashion by the then French president Jacques Chirac, who argued that the world must
be turned back into a multipolar one because “any community with only one dominant power
is always a dangerous one and provokes reactions.” 1
If the crisis of the old American-led order is reducible to the Bush administration's
policies, the crisis may now have passed. The Obama administration has made the restoration
of American liberal hegemonic leadership—or what Secretary of State Clinton has called
a “multipartner world”—the centerpiece of its foreign policy agenda. 2 But if the crisis was
generated by the inherent tensions and insecurities that flow from a unipolar distribution of
power, the crisis will surely persist. It may be that a hierarchical order with liberal charac-
teristics is simply not sustainable in a unipolar world—either because others will inevitably
resist it or because the hegemon will inevitably become increasingly imperialistic.
Other observers argue that the problems with the American-led order run in a different
direction. The crisis of the old is not about American unipolarity; it is about the passing of the
American era of dominance. The conflicts and controversies are a struggle by states to shape
what comes next, after unipolarity. This great shift is being triggered by a return to multi-
polarity and the rise of rival global powers with their own order-building agendas. 3 In this
view, the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent world economic downturn—the most severe
since the Great Depression—was an especially stark demonstration of the pressures on the
American-led liberal system. Unlike past postwar economic crises, this one had its origins in
the United States, and it has served to tarnish the American model of liberal capitalism and
raised new doubts about the capacities of the United States to act as the global leader in the
provision of economic stability and advancement. 4 With the decline of American unipolarity,
we are witnessing the beginning of a struggle over leadership and dominance.
Still other observers accept this view of declining American power and go on to argue that
it is liberal international order itself that is ending. The rise of new power centers will come
with new agendas for organizing the basic logic and principles of international order. China
is the obvious protagonist in this emerging grand drama. Rather than becoming a stakeholder
in the existing order, China will use its growing power to push world politics in an illiberal
direction. 5 It is the underlying openness and rule-based character of international order that
is in transition.
These various claims prompt basic questions about the nature of the troubles that beset
the American-led postwar order. Did the Bush administration simply mishandle or misman-