{"id":222895,"date":"2022-10-31T12:01:42","date_gmt":"2022-10-31T12:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=222895"},"modified":"2024-06-12T07:44:11","modified_gmt":"2024-06-12T06:44:11","slug":"why-us-hegemony-is-incompatible-with-a-rules-based-international-order","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/10\/why-us-hegemony-is-incompatible-with-a-rules-based-international-order\/","title":{"rendered":"Why US Hegemony Is Incompatible with a \u2018Rules-Based International Order\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

A bad argument for invading the Solomon Islands reflects the inherent conflict between US dominance and its purported liberal values.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

PEARL HARBOR, 1 May 2017. Commander, U.S. Pacific Command Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr. speaks to Sailors and Marines during an all hands call aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island (LHD 8).
(U.S. Navy photo by Specialist 1st Class Larry S. Carlson)<\/p><\/div>\n

29 Aug 2022 – <\/em>There is no shortage of bad ideas circulating in U.S. foreign policy discourse. On occasion, however, a particularly poor argument can be helpful insofar as it reveals something noteworthy about the assumptions and ideology that produced it.<\/p>\n

With an article in The National Interest<\/em> entitled \u201cDon\u2019t Rule Out Intervention in the Solomon Islands<\/a>,\u201d Julian Spencer-Churchill provides such an example. The piece \u2014 which makes the case that Australia and the United States ought to consider military intervention to topple the government of the Solomon Islands in the wake of the small nation\u2019s adoption of a security pact with China \u2014 presents an inartful mix of threat inflation, outright factual error, and regurgitations of basic international relations theory, and is not particularly worth engaging with in and of itself.<\/p>\n

Yet Spencer-Churchill\u2019s argument is useful in that it draws out some important contradictions in the strategy of liberal hegemony that drives U.S. foreign policy, and the \u201crules-based international order\u201d it supposedly upholds.<\/p>\n

The piece begins with a brief recitation of the origins and importance of self-determination and state sovereignty to the international system. This is immediately followed by a claim on behalf of the \u201ccoalition of democracies\u201d to a right to violate these principles more or less at will.<\/p>\n

This coalition, Spencer-Churchill writes, has \u201clegally and morally valid justifications for intervention in a foreign country\u201d first, \u201cwhen there is a dire security threat that emerges within its sphere of influence\u201d and second, \u201cbecause liberal democracies have an unprecedented understanding of the world population\u2019s aspirations for human rights-based rule of law and innovation-based prosperity for middle-income countries.\u201d The policies of liberal democracies, he asserts \u201care moving in concert with the broader direction of history.\u201d The citation for this last statement is a link to a brief summary of Francis Fukuyama\u2019s \u201cEnd of History.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first claim bears a notable resemblance to Russia\u2019s justifications of its ongoing aggressive war against Ukraine. Such claims of \u201cdire security threats\u201d can be asserted by great powers with little evidence and no need for ratification by any third party, and, as Spencer-Churchill demonstrates, it is easy to gin up a grave security threat out of developments that pose no significant danger<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The second claim is even more striking. In essence, Spencer-Churchill argues that all peoples self-evidently desire liberal democratic capitalism, and therefore capitalist democracies like the United States have a right to deliver this system to them by force, whether asked for or not.<\/p>\n

This contention, of course, is nothing new. It has helped sell numerous U.S. military interventions since the Second World War and itself is only a refinement of the \u201ccivilizing missions\u201d of earlier European imperialisms. Yet, in a year when the United States has rallied global opposition to Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine in the name of upholding the rules-based international order, state sovereignty, and self-determination, the absurdity of Spencer-Churchill\u2019s claims is shown in stark relief.<\/p>\n

In Spencer-Churchill\u2019s formulation, the United States and its allies serve as the guarantors of a rules-based international order, but also enjoy license to violate these rules under broad circumstances of their own determination. While it is not often laid out so bluntly, this is largely how US foreign policy has operated for over seven decades. The United States points to a liberal order as the justification for and result of its predominant military power and global influence, and will invoke that order in the face of other parties\u2019 abuses, but will accept no restraints on its own freedom of action.<\/p>\n

This is well demonstrated by Washington\u2019s habitual rejection<\/a> of international treaties produced by the United Nations system (the creation of which, of course, was led by the U.S. itself). The U.S. will nonetheless wield<\/a> these treaties against the behavior of other nations, as it does with China\u2019s maritime claims and the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the United States has neither signed nor ratified.<\/p>\n

When proponents of liberal hegemony acknowledge this tension, some argue that it is necessary, even beneficial to the project of building a stable, liberal world order. The international system is anarchic and actors worse than the United States abound, ready to fill any power vacuum left vacant by Washington or its close allies. Such an order needs a powerful state to enforce it, and sometimes it may be necessary to bend or even break rules<\/a> in defense of higher principles.<\/p>\n

In a recent article<\/a> for The Atlantic<\/em>, journalist Tom McTague made such a case, examining the \u201cidea that convinces U.S. leaders that they never oppress, only liberate, and that their interventions can never be a threat to nearby powers, because the USA is not imperialist.\u201d McTague recognizes that this \u2013 the notion that the U.S. is driven by universal values and acts in the universal interest \u2013 is both a \u201cdelusion\u201d and \u201clies at the core of [the United States\u2019] most costly foreign policy miscalculations.\u201d Yet McTague asserts that this delusion is necessary to sustain Anglo America\u2019s commitment to upholding global order and keeping more malicious powers at bay.<\/p>\n

Never mind that some of the heroic interventions McTague cites \u2014 like the Korean War \u2014 were in fact atrocity-ridden debacles<\/a> that could not credibly be presented as defenses of democracy at the time they actually took place, his larger case is also unpersuasive. Outside of the U.S. and Europe, what he calls the \u201cnecessary myth\u201d of North American benevolence has been hemorrhaging credibility, and the hypocrisy at the heart of the liberal international order is not a means to its perpetuation, but rather to its steady undoing.<\/p>\n

Decades of lawless interventions in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America have left\u00a0nations of the Global South deeply and rightly skeptical<\/a> of the United States as an upholder of international law. Younger US citizens increasingly reject<\/a> U.S. exceptionalism and global military dominance as well.<\/p>\n

As US relative power declines and we move toward an increasingly multipolar international system, the contradictions inherent in Washington\u2019s version of the liberal order will become even harder to ignore. A United States that faces more and greater challenges to its power will likely turn to increasingly coercive means to defend that power, rendering its \u201cliberal\u201d guise increasingly threadbare.<\/p>\n

It is clear that, going forward, the laudable goal of creating a global order based on international law and mutually agreeable rules of conduct is incompatible with U.S. hegemony \u2014 or for that matter, the hypothetical hegemony of any other power. Any state possessing a preponderance of power will, as the U.S. has, reject external restraints on that power. Any \u201crules-based order\u201d put forward by a hegemon will be wielded in service of hegemony, not the other way around.<\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

Sam Fraser is a researcher and senior communications associate at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He holds a B.A. in International Relations and his studies focused on U.S. foreign policy and Latin America. He has conducted field research on human rights and transitional justice in Argentina and has also studied the issue of impunity for U.S. foreign policy officials for his undergraduate thesis entitled<\/em> \u201cThe Catastrophe Artists: Understanding America\u2019s Unaccountable Foreign Policy Elite.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 responsiblestatecraft.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“It is clear that, going forward, the laudable goal of creating a global order based on international law and mutually agreeable rules of conduct is incompatible with U.S. hegemony \u2014 or for that matter, the hypothetical hegemony of any other power. Any state possessing a preponderance of power will, as the U.S. has, reject external restraints on that power. Any \u201crules-based order\u201d put forward by a hegemon will be wielded in service of hegemony, not the other way around.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":222896,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,2642,276,1126,1050,3043,2200,70],"class_list":["post-222895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-anti-imperialism","tag-democracy","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-rbio-rules-based-international-order","tag-us-empire","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222895"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264084,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222895\/revisions\/264084"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}