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of success, leading and rising states in the system are not seeking to overturn the basic logic
of liberal internationalism as a system of open and rule-based order. Rather, the pressures and
incentives for change are felt in regard to the way roles and responsibilities are allocated in
the system.
The way in which liberal order evolves will hinge in important respects on the United
States—and its willingness and ability to make new commitments to rules and institutions
while simultaneously reducing its rights and privileges within the order. The United States
is deeply ambivalent about making institutional commitments and binding itself to other
states—ambivalence and hesitation that have been exacerbated by the end of the Cold War,
American unipolarity, and new security threats. But the United States still possesses profound
incentives to build and operate within a liberal rule-based order. Just as importantly, that or-
der is now not simply an extension of American power and interests but has taken on a life of
its own. American power may rise or fall, and its foreign policy ideology may wax and wane
between multilateral and imperial impulses, but the wider and deeper liberal global order is
now a reality to which America itself must accommodate.
1
The legal scholar Lassa Oppenheim argued that a balance of power among states is “an indispensable condition
of the very existence of international law. . . . If the Powers cannot keep one another in check, no rules of law will
have force, since an overwhelming State will naturally try to act according to discretion and disobey the law.” Lassa
Oppenheim,
International Law
, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1912), 193.
2
Various scholars have emphasized the connection between the rise of the sovereign state and the state system
and the rise of international law and institutions. See Leo Gross, “The Peace of Westphalia, 1648-1948,”
American
Journal of International Law
53 (1959), 1-29; and Bull,
Anarchical Society
. This theme is also explored in Krasner,
Sovereignty
.
3
See Ikenberry,
After Victory
, Chap. Two.
4
A variation of this problem is noted by Stanley Hoffmann. He argues that liberal internationalism has been par-
ticularly good at “negative tasks.” In the economic area, liberalism's great goal has been to open up markets and tear
down trade barriers. In the political arenas, liberalism has battled against colonialism and imperialism, and during
the Cold War, it struggled against communism. As Hoffmann argues, liberalism is political thinking that was forged
in the effort to protect the individual against tyranny, aggression, and illegitimate violence. It runs into difficulties
when it sets about tackling positive tasks. See Hoffmann, “The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism,” in his book of
essays,
World Disorders: Troubled Peace in the Post-Cold War Era
(Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 75-77.
5
On the erosion of “embedded liberalism,” see Jonathan Kirshner, “Keynes, Capital Mobility and the Crisis of
Embedded Liberalism,”
Review of International Political Economy
6, no. 3 (Autumn 1999), 313-37; Mark Blyth,
Great Transformations: The Rise and Fall of Embedded Liberalism
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
and Robert Skidelsky,
Keynes: The Return of the Master
(New York: Public Affairs, 2009).
6
Wilson, speech to the First Assemblage of the League to Enforce Peace, Washington, DC, 27 May 1916.
7
Lloyd E. Ambrosius,
Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations
(New
York: Palgrave, 2002), 130.
8
See discussion in chapter 5. For a survey of shifting norms of state sovereignty, see Haass, “Sovereignty.” The
emerging doctrine of the responsibility to protect is the most systematic notion that captures the changing terms of
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