A sweeping account of the rise and evolution of liberal
internationalism in the modern era For two hundred years,
the grand project of liberal internationalism has been to build a
world order that is ...open, loosely rules-based, and oriented toward
progressive ideas. Today this project is in crisis, threatened from
the outside by illiberal challengers and from the inside by
nationalist-populist movements. This timely book offers the first
full account of liberal internationalism's long journey from its
nineteenth-century roots to today's fractured political moment.
Creating an international "space" for liberal democracy, preserving
rights and protections within and between countries, and balancing
conflicting values such as liberty and equality, openness and
social solidarity, and sovereignty and interdependence-these are
the guiding aims that have propelled liberal internationalism
through the upheavals of the past two centuries. G. John Ikenberry
argues that in a twenty-first century marked by rising economic and
security interdependence, liberal internationalism-reformed and
reimagined-remains the most viable project to protect liberal
democracy.
In the post–Cold War period, scholars have considered the Asia Pacific to be ripe for military competition and conflict. Developments over the past decade have deepened these expectations. Across the ...region, rising military spending and efforts of various states to bolster their military capabilities appear to have created an increasingly volatile climate, along with potentially vicious cycles of mutual arming and rearming. In this context, claims that China's rapid economic growth and surging military spending are fomenting destabilizing arms races and security dilemmas are widespread. Such claims make for catchy headlines, yet they are rarely subject to rigorous empirical tests. Whether patterns of military competition in the Asia Pacific are in fact attributable to a security dilemma–based logic has important implications for international relations theory and foreign policy. The answer has direct consequences for how leaders can maximize the likelihood that peace and stability will prevail in this economically and strategically vital region. A systematic empirical test derived from influential theoretical scholarship on the security dilemma concept assesses the drivers of bilateral and multilateral frictions and military competition under way in the Asia Pacific. Security dilemma–driven competition appears to be an important contributor, yet the outcome is not structurally determined. Although this military competition could grow significantly in the near future, there are a number of available measures that could help to ameliorate or manage some of its worst aspects.
After sixty-five years of pursuing a grand strategy of global leadership—nearly a third of which transpired without a peer great power rival—has the time come for the United States to switch to a ...strategy of retrenchment? According to most security studies scholars who write on the future of U.S. grand strategy, the answer is an unambiguous yes: they argue that the United States should curtail or eliminate its overseas military presence, abolish or dramatically reduce its global security commitments, and minimize or eschew efforts to foster and lead the liberal institutional order. Thus far, the arguments for retrenchment have gone largely unanswered by international relations scholars. An evaluation of these arguments requires a systematic analysis that directly assesses the core claim of retrenchment advocates that the current "deep engagement" grand strategy is not in the national interests of the United States. This analysis shows that advocates of retrenchment radically overestimate the costs of deep engagement and underestimate its benefits. We conclude that the fundamental choice to retain a grand strategy of deep engagement after the Cold War is just what the preponderance of international relations scholarship would expect a rational, self-interested leading power in America's position to do.
For more than half a century, the United States has played a leading role in shaping order in East Asia. This East Asian order has been organized around American military and economic dominance, ...anchored in the U.S. system of alliances with Japan, South Korea, and other partners across Asia. Over the decades, the United States found itself playing a hegemonic role in the region—providing security, underwriting stability, promoting open markets, and fostering alliance and political partnerships. It was an order organized around “hard” bilateral security ties and “soft” multilateral groupings. It was built around security, economic, and political bargains. The United States exported security and imported goods. Across the region, countries expanded trade, pursued democratic transitions, and maintained a more or less stable peace.
These are not happy times for liberal internationalists. No one can be sure how deep the crisis of liberal internationalism runs. However, in what follows, I argue that despite its troubles, liberal ...internationalism still has a future. The nature of the crisis is surprising. The threats to liberal internationalism were expected to come from rising non-western states seeking to undermine or overturn the postwar order. In the face of hostile, revisionist states, the United States and Europe were expected to stand shoulder to shoulder to protect the gains from 70 years of cooperation. But, in fact, liberal internationalism is more deeply threatened by developments within the West itself. The centrist and progressive coalitions that lay behind the postwar liberal order have weakened. Liberal democracy itself appears fragile and polarized, vulnerable to far right populism and backlash politics. In recent decades, the working and middle classes in advanced industrial democracies—the original constituencies and beneficiaries of an open and cooperative international order—have faced rising economic inequality and stagnation. Within the West, liberal internationalism is increasingly seen, not as a source of stability and solidarity among like-minded states, but as a global playing field for the wealthy and influential. Liberal internationalism has lost its connection to the pursuit of social and economic advancement within western countries.
The crisis of american foreign policy Ikenberry, G. John; Knock,Thomas J; Slaughter, Anne-Marie ...
2009., 20081124, 2008, 2009-01-01, 20090101
eBook
Was George W. Bush the true heir of Woodrow Wilson, the architect of liberal internationalism? Was the Iraq War a result of liberal ideas about America’s right to promote democracy abroad? In this ...timely book, four distinguished scholars of American foreign policy discuss the relationship between the ideals of Woodrow Wilson and those of George W. Bush. The Crisis of American Foreign Policy exposes the challenges resulting from Bush’s foreign policy and ponders America’s place in the international arena. Led by John Ikenberry, one of today’s foremost foreign policy thinkers, this provocative collection examines the traditions of liberal internationalism that have dominated American foreign policy since the end of World War II. Tony Smith argues that Bush and the neoconservatives followed Wilson in their commitment to promoting democracy abroad. Thomas Knock and Anne-Marie Slaughter disagree and contend that Wilson focused on the building of a collaborative and rule-centered world order, an idea the Bush administration actively resisted. The authors ask if the United States is still capable of leading a cooperative effort to handle the pressing issues of the new century, or if the country will have to go it alone, pursuing policies without regard to the interests of other governments.
The end of the Cold War and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union resulted in a new unipolar international system that presented fresh challenges to international relations theory. Since the ...Enlightenment, scholars have speculated that patterns of cooperation and conflict might be systematically related to the manner in which power is distributed among states. Most of what we know about this relationship, however, is based on European experiences between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, when five or more powerful states dominated international relations, and the latter twentieth century, when two superpowers did so. Building on a highly successful special issue of the leading journal World Politics, this book seeks to determine whether what we think we know about power and patterns of state behaviour applies to the current 'unipolar' setting and, if not, how core theoretical propositions about interstate interactions need to be revised.
Reasons of State Ikenberry, G. John
2018, 2018-08-15, 2018-03-05
eBook
Open access
In this lucid and theoretically sophisticated book, G. John Ikenberry focuses on the oil price shocks of 1973–74 and 1979, which placed extraordinary new burdens on governments worldwide and ...particularly on that of the United States. Reasons of State examines the response of the United States to these and other challenges and identifies both the capacities of the American state to deal with rapid international political and economic change and the limitations that constrain national policy.
Liberalism and its republican precursors provide the largest and best-developed body of restraint theory and practice. Realist, libertarian and other criticisms of liberalism and liberal ...internationalism fall short on both historical and theoretical grounds. Liberal internationalism has had a profoundly progressive - even revolutionary - impact on the modern world order, advancing the grand transition from a world of empire to a world of nation-states, building an infrastructure of rules and institutions to foster and protect liberal democracy, and generating international coalitions and projects for tackling the gravest threats to world order and humanity. Unlike the schools of thought that make up the Quincy coalition, liberal internationalism places at the centre of its vision the cooperative organisation of international order - led by the United States and other liberal democracies, allies and partners - to defend shared liberal values and manage global problems of interdependence.
Theories of international relations, assumed to be universally applicable, have failed to explain the creation of states in Africa. There, the interaction of power and space is dramatically different ...from what occurred in Europe. In States and Power in Africa , Jeffrey Herbst places the African state-building process in a truly comparative perspective. Herbst’s bold contention—that the conditions now facing African state-builders existed long before European penetration of the continent—is sure to provoke controversy, for it runs counter to the prevailing assumption that colonialism changed everything.
This revised edition includes a new preface in which the author links the enormous changes that have taken place in Africa over the past fifteen years to long-term state consolidation. The final chapter on policy prescriptions has also been revised to reflect the evolution of African and international responses to state failure.
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