From Democracy Digest.

The main error of liberal internationalism is that its advocates have mistaken an aspiration for reality, and by so doing have gotten a basic chunk of causality exactly backwards, argues Adam Garfinkle, the Founding Editor of The American Interest. International consensus, international law, and UN Security Council resolutions have not produced the post-World War II international order, and what remains of it today, he writes for the Foreign Policy Research Institute:

These are consequences, not causes, of an order produced by the advanced democracies of the West, led by the United States and girded by American power and reputation. In other words, these abstract nouns are epiphenomenal of more substantive realities, and it follows that if those substantive realities change so, eventually, will their downstream effluvia. Put another way, liberal internationalists get the ontology wrong.

The institutional sinews of the postwar liberal international order, their associated norms along with them, will surely weaken and decay in time unless the U.S. government suddenly switches direction and recovers the sense of its inner virtue, which is the sine qua non of an activist and liberal global policy, Garfinkle adds. The simulacrum of a global institutional order can persist for a while, ….. But with the European Union in profound and likely protracted disarray [there is] no other substitute for disinterested American verve imaginable. RTWT

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