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gues, but the problem is that it cannot contain its own excesses. The neoconservatives who
championed the Iraq war, he contends, are heirs to the liberal international tradition, distort-
ing it but nonetheless using its ideas to justify preemptive war.
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Liberal internationalists think that the international community can distinguish between
good and bad interventions. The Iraq war, after all, was not originally justified as a human-
itarian intervention. It was a preventive war. Anne-Marie Slaughter argues that the dangers
identified by David Rieff, Tony Smith, and others do not go to the heart of liberal internation-
alism. A mechanism does exist—or can be devised—to separate good interventionism from
bad. She suggests that it is a mechanism that grows out of the Wilsonian vision—namely a
this shifts the problem back to the United States and its capacity and willingness to work with
and listen to its democratic partners. The challenge remains to develop agreed-upon stand-
ards and practices for intervention—and the capacities to back them up. Whether this can be
done in a way that makes good on liberal international norms and principles but stops short
of disasters and abuses remains an open question.
Democracy and International Authority
Another dilemma in the organization of liberal international order is the tension that exists
between democracy at home and strengthened authority of international institutions. Here the
question is, how does international order build up authority and capacity at the internation-
al level—in international bodies and agreements—without jeopardizing the popular rule and
accountability built into liberal democratic states? Can the authority and capacity of the in-
ternational community to act be strengthened without sacrificing constitutional democracy as
home?
This is an unresolved problem in the liberal international project. Liberals anticipate a
growing role for the international community in the functioning of the global system. The
postwar era itself has seen a sharp increase in the norms and cooperative efforts launched on
behalf of the international community. The human rights revolution and the rise of interna-
tional norms relating to arms control and security cooperation carry with them expectations
that the outside world will act when governments fail to act properly. The growing econom-
ic interdependence of states also creates rising demands for governance norms and institu-
tions. But how do states square the domestic and international liberal visions? That is, how do
they reconcile the international liberal vision of increasing authority lodged above the nation-
state—where there is a sharing and pooling of sovereignty—with domestic liberal democracy
built on popular sovereignty?
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This is an old problem, of course. International cooperation is a process, as I argued in
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