The Great Transformation and the Failure of Illiberal Hegemony - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 175

In a fundamental sense, there is an authority crisis within today's liberal order. The inter-
national community is the repository for new human rights and national security norms—but
who can legitimately act on its behalf? American leadership of liberal international order was
made acceptable to the other states during the Cold War because it was providing security
protection—and, over the horizon, there was “something worse.” American power and au-
thority are not one and the same anymore. How to establish legitimate authority for concerted
international action on behalf of the global community—and do so when the old norms of
order are fading away—is the great challenge of international order. The events of September
11 and the Bush revolution crystallized and intensified these new post-Westphalian contro-
versies over power and authority.
The Rise and Fall of the Bush Revolution
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, the Bush administration embarked
on an ambitious rethinking of American grand strategy—the most sweeping since the early
years of the Cold War. Controversial ideas about preventive war, “coalitions of the willing,”
and hegemonic dominance were enshrined as doctrine. Bush administration officials also sent
signals to the world about basic shifts in America's postwar national security policies regard-
ing the use of force, deterrence, and alliance partnership. President Bush announced a “war
on terror” and a determination to “take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and con-
front the worst threats before they emerge.” 52 The American invasion of Iraq in the spring
of 2003—a preventive war launched over the opposition of many Western allies—was the
definitive expression of this strategic reorientation.
The Bush administration embraced the evolving post-Westphalian order—marked by uni-
polarity, eroded sovereignty, and nonstate sources of violence and insecurity—and proposed
a new hegemonic bargain with the world. But in the years that followed, the Bush administra-
tion's grand strategic proposal to alter the terms of the American hegemonic leadership were
rejected by allies and other states around the world—rejected quite emphatically, in many in-
stances. The Bush administration proposed a system of hegemonic order with fewer liberal
characteristics and more imperial characteristics, and the world—for the most part—rejected
this system. Global worries about how an American-dominated unipolar world, organized
around the “war on terror,” would work followed the Bush administration to the end of its
term. We can look at both the elements of Bush's grand strategy and the causes and conse-
quences of its failure.