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96 Foreign Aff. 2 (2017)
The Plot against American Foreign Policy: Can the Liberal Order Survive

handle is hein.journals/fora96 and id is 448 raw text is: .. . . .. . .. 2 FOREIGN AFFAIRS The Plot Against American Foreign Policy Can the Liberal Order Survive? G. John Ikenberry Is the world witnessing the demise of the U.S.-led liberal order? If so, this is not how it was supposed to happen. The great threats were supposed to come from hostile revisionist powers seeking to overturn the postwar order. The United States and Europe were supposed to stand shoulder to shoulder to protect the gains reaped from 70 years of cooperation. Instead, the world's most powerful state has begun to sabotage the order it created. A hostile revisionist power has indeed arrived on the scene, but it sits in the Oval Office, the beating heart of the free world. Across ancient and modern eras, orders built by great powers have come and gone-but they have usually ended in murder, not suicide. U.S. President Donald Trump's every instinct runs counter to the ideas that have underpinned the postwar international system. Trade, alliances, international law, multilateralism, environmental protection, torture, and human rights-on all these core issues, Trump has made pronounce- ments that, if acted on, would bring to an end the United States' role as guarantor G. JOHN IKENBERRY is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. of the liberal world order. He has broken with 70 years of tradition by signaling the end of U.S. support for the European Union: endorsing Brexit and making common cause with right-wing European parties that seek to unravel the postwar European project. In his inaugural address, Trump declared, From this moment on, it's going to be America first, and he announced his intention to rethink the central accomplishments of the U.S.-led order-the trade and alliance systems. Where previous presidents have invoked the country's past foreign policy triumphs, Trump describes horrible deals and allies that aren't paying their bills. His is a vision of a dark and dangerous world in which the United States is besieged by Islamic terrorism, immigrants, and crime as its wealth and confidence fade. In his revisionist narrative, the era of Pax Americana-the period in which the United States wielded the most power on the world stage-is defined above all by national loss and decline. Trump's challenge to the liberal order is all the more dangerous because it comes with a casual disrespect for the norms and values of liberal democracy itself. The president has questioned the legitimacy of federal judges, attacked the press, and shown little regard for the Constitution or the rule of law. Facts, evidence, scientific knowledge, due dili- gence, reasoned discourse-the essential elements of democratic political life- are disparaged daily. One must look long and hard to find any utterances by Trump about the virtues of the nation's political traditions, the genius of the Founding Fathers, or the great struggles and accomplishments of liberal democracy. This silence speaks loudly. And in February, when asked on Fox News

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