Crisis of the Old Order - Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order - page 18

Chapter 5 provides a survey of the logic and character of the American postwar liberal he-
gemonic order. The core of this new order was established among the Western democracies,
but its ideas and institutions were potentially universal in scope. The vision behind this order
was expressed in a sequence of declarations and agreements—the Atlantic Charter of 1941,
the Bretton Woods agreements of 1944, the U.N. Charter in 1945, the Marshall Plan in 1947,
and the Atlantic Pact in 1949. Together, these agreements provided a framework for a radical
reorganization of relations among the Western democracies—and a basis for the wider in-
tegration of much of the postwar world. Between 1944 and 1951, American leaders engaged
in the most intensive institution building the world has ever seen—global, regional, security,
economic, and political. The United States took the lead in fashioning a world of multilateral
rules, institutions, open markets, democratic community, and regional partnerships—and it
put itself at the center of it all.
Chapter 6 examines the great transformation and the crisis of the American order. It looks
at the long-term shifts in the global system that have eroded the foundations upon which the
United States constructed the postwar order. These shifts amount to an inversion of the West-
phalian system in which great powers maintained order through an equilibrium of power and
the norms of state sovereignty. Under conditions of unipolarity and eroded norms of state
sovereignty, American power has become a problem in world politics. In effect, there has
been a shift over time in the character and mix of modes of American domination. The rise
of American unipolarity after the end of the Cold War—together with other long-term shifts
in the global system—have altered the incentives, costs, bargains, and institutions that form
the foundation of the American postwar order. These shifts have rendered more problematic
America's commitment to liberal hegemony and rule-based order.
I also explore the failed efforts of the Bush administration to embrace this post-Westphali-
an moment to impose a new system of order on the world. The Bush administration sought
to build on the transformations on the global system—the rise of unipolarity and the flipping
of the Westphalian order—and articulate a new vision of American-centered order. Funda-
mentally, the Bush administration offered up a vision of order that was, in important respects,
hegemony with imperial characteristics. The United States was to step forward and provide
rule and order based on its unilateral assertion of power and rights. It is a vision of American
as a conservative Leviathan. This post-Westphalian logic of order has failed. The world has
rejected it, and the United States cannot sustain it.
The experience of the Bush administration shows that there are limits to the ability of
powerful states to operate outside the norms and institutional frameworks of liberal interna-
tional order. The Bush experience shows that the world's leading state can break out of insti-
tutional and normative constraints—even those that it has itself helped create—but that there
is a price to be paid for it. Lost legitimacy, partnerships, cooperation, and credibility do have
consequences.