The Perfect Storm: The International Liberal Order and the Biden Administration – Leonardo Ramos & Filipe Mendonça

Leonardo Ramos (PUC Minas, Brazil), Filipe Mendonça (UFU, Brazil)

Introduction

‘The international liberal order is in crisis; the international liberal order is changing’. Such expressions are current in contemporary international relations, with analysts being more or less sceptical about the possibilities to overcome such crisis or challenges. Critical scholars as Stephen Gill (2011), Inderjeet Parmar (2018 and 2019), Jonathan Pass (2020), Lorenzo Fusaro (2018) and Milan Babic (2020) had produced interesting and thought-provoking analysis, highlighting economic, ideological, ethical, cultural and racial dimensions of the crisis. It is consensual among these authors that the international liberal order (ILO) has structured International Relations field since the end of the II World War. Even though contemporary challenges – such as COVID, populism and alt-right movements – are not their first, since the beginning of the twenty-first century reflections on its possibilities of change or maintenance has emerged.

In order to cope with such transformation, it is necessary to take a conceptual step first, and to do it, we should start from Robert W. Cox’s definition of world order. For him, ‘world order’ refers to a particular ‘configuration of material and ideational power’, that relates to some prevalent collective image and that includes certain norms “and a set of institutions which administer the order with a certain semblance of universality” (Cox, 1981: 139). In those terms, the ILO is an “institutional structure that is supported and legitimated by an ideational underpinning” (Babic, 2020: 769) that emerged and have been nourished since the end the World War II. With the support of Western Europe, the US devoted energy and efforts ‘to build a far-flung system of multilateral institutions, alliances, trade agreements, and political partnerships’ (Ikenberry, 2014: 81; Ikenberry, 2018). Expanding the Coxian conception of order, the current order architecture bears material, ideological, and normative consequences —under the form of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the UN Security Council (UNSC), and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) (Babic, 2020).

But since the 2007-8 financial crisis, successive turbulences have struck the pillars of ILO. The rise of alternative-right (alt-right) governments is challenging post-World War II international norms, economic and trade liberalisation, and the limits of the international cooperation on the international financial system. In the same vein, the reverberations of the Crimea crisis in 2014 showed that international security cooperation has potentially reached its limits (van der Pijl, 2018). Further, the US unchangeable position regarding the reforms of the IMF, the World Bank, and the immobility of the UNSC – despite the perennial demands from emerging powers such as Brazil, India, and South Africa – questions the real openness of the architects to reform the ILO. Last, the rise of the alt-right and their autocratic affinity, coupled with the increasing importance of non-Western countries that are not models of liberal democracy (e.g., China and Russia), draw attention to the limits of liberal democracy as a desirable narrative in the global governance.

At its core, the international order crisis mirrors the current limitations faced by the US to reproduce its hegemony globally —through international institutions. As the chief architect of the liberal order, the US has not been able to eliminate its points of tension; instead, in the last years US have in some sense departed from its own liberal order, criticising the multilateral institutions, abandoning historical alliances, questioning trade agreements and not fully supporting liberal democracy – both internally and externally.

The withdrawal of central states from the ILO has led the system to a crisis of authority. There is a void that cannot be captured by the old ordering framework and by the old actors that represent the dying order. According to Babic (2020), on the economic side, the principal crisis drivers are the structural changes and long-term developments of the global economy and how the American hegemony projects on it. On the political side, two components are in play. First, the crisis manifests at the state level, on the dynamics between national developments and the international sphere. Second, the underlying domestic societal changes that undermine ideational support for the ILO. Hence, the national-international divide constitutes a key aspect of the organic crisis of the ILO: it loses its legitimacy at the international level and its supporting actors (gatekeeper or central states) do not offer a solution but move themselves away from its core elements.

US Hegemony, perfect storm and Biden administration

Looking to the world order in current times, the analogy of the perfect storm seems appropriate. As in a ‘perfect storm’, when two atmospheric phenomena of great proportions (such as a hurricane and a storm) combine in a way that it amplifies their effects, the current ILO crisis combines with the COVID pandemic crisis – initially an occasional and fleeting event, but whose development suggests a greater historical reach. Even more, critical domestic and international conjunctures come together so as to combine in very particular way in US, urging crucial political actions from Biden administration in order to rebuilt, at least in a limited scope, US hegemony through a particular world order.

Following a Gramscian inspired framework, hegemony can be seen as the synthesis of domination and leadership (Fusaro, 2018: 58). Four years of Donald Trump have deeply damaged US credibility and leadership globally. Trump’s ‘America First’ policy and abandonment of multilateral institutions weakened the ILO as well as “emboldened the more powerful challengers to that order, such as Russia and China” (Acharya, 2021). Therefore, we can highlight at least three main aspects of world order that are paramount to Biden administration. In a context of organic crisis, each one of them expresses important contradictions, and the political response the US government give to them will be paramount to the future of the world order.

The first aspect concerns to the tensions and contradictions between national (domestic) and international priorities to Biden administration. Domestically, Biden is facing enormous challenges: COVID pandemic – and the unvaccinated people and antivax movements – and the sanitary crisis, fiscal crisis, racial injustices and a political polarization closely related to such crisis. Such political polarization has turns into violent acts such as the violent attack against the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. And in such delicate political context, another important variable is Trump’s return to US politics, which will probably have impact on Biden’s administration.

All this is happening in at the same time the US leadership is under critique in multiples fronts in the global political economy. Of course, US under Biden presidency is trying to reconstruct and reinvigorating its international alliances; nevertheless, the “Build Back Better” plan can conflict with some of these international priorities highlighted by Biden. Particularly, US policies intended to prioritize American workers in the current infrastructure investments. This will probably disturb US allies, who will demand to partake of it, with a fair share of such investments. In this process, domestic tensions have a profound impact: the bipartisan infrastructure investment bill advanced on 27th July is less than a quarter the size of the $2.6 trillion plan proposed by Biden in March. Democrats will try to approve a US$3.5 trillion budget proposal as a budget reconciliation, which requires fewer votes; but even so, it is clear how national-international tensions are affecting US attempts to reconstruct its world leadership.

The second aspect concerns to the tensions that have emerged in the last years between US and its historical allies, and the current paths Biden is following in order to recovery the multilateralism closely related to the ILO. In general terms, Biden international economic policy, as well as Trump’s one, is not so close to traditional trade negotiation – Biden have not demonstrated any interest in re-joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), despite Japan’s desire (Hayashi, 2021) –, which could negatively affect is intention to recovery the leadership in the Indo-Pacific region. In fact, any attempt in such direction should present a proposal of economic and trade cooperation.

In this context, the US government seeks to put the United States at the centre of the world. Important attempts to recover multilateralism are underway. US participation on vaccine diplomacy points to it: US has following a path of privileging some important partners as well as the reactivation of multilateralism through WHO and the Covaxin Initiative. G7 is also relevant: after a disrupted summit in 2019, characterized by Trump’s behaviour on it, and a year without a leaders’ summit due to COVID global pandemic, the G7 summit in 2021 was a benchmark in the US rescue of multilateralism and the ILO. One important initiative of the G7 summit was the B3W, clearly developed to contain the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The third aspect concerns to the increasing tensions between US and China. In accordance with Kurt Campbell, the National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, “the period that was broadly defined as engagement has come to an end.” In this sense, Biden follows Trump’s steps, once China is a kind of “cross-party consensus”, seen as the main threat to Pax Americana.

Such tensions have leveraged a debate on the emergence – or not – of a “New Cold War” (van der Pijl, 2018; Acharya, 2021; Foster, 2021). Despite the relevance or not of such idea, it is clear that Biden administration is taken hard actions against China. The first high-level bilateral talks between US and China after Biden’s election, on March 18, 2021, followed by US aggressive attacks in China in the following weeks – including hybrid warfare and “combining an array of political, economic, financial, technological, cyber, and more traditional overt and covert military means” are an evidence of it (Foster, 2021: 7).

How far are these situations provoking a turning point in the world order? The current crisis presents serious limits to US leadership. If the financial crisis of 2007-8 can be seen as the apex of organic processes that, at that time, hit the epicentre of capitalism, Trump administration and the current COVID-19 pandemic combined in a ‘perfect storm’, bringing together organic and conjunctural aspects that erodes even more the ILO and, therefore, US hegemony.

That is the perfect storm that Biden government will have to face. If Biden administration be successful in dealing with such contradictions, through ideological engagement, international norms and institutions, as well as through the force, maybe it could contribute to rebuild a world order – not so western nor liberal at all, but more pluralistic with China being a crucial actor in it.

References

Babic, M. 2020. “Let’s Talk about the Interregnum: Gramsci and the Crisis of the Liberal World Order.” International Affairs 96(3): 767–86.

Cox, R W. 1987. Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History. Columbia University Press.

Foster, J. B. 2021. “The New Cold War on China.” Monthly Review. https://monthlyreview.org/2021/07/01/the-new-cold-war-on-china/.

Fusaro, L. 2018. Crises and Hegemonic Transitions: From Gramsci’s Quaderni to the Contemporary World Economy. Brill.

Gill, S. 2011. Global Crises and the Crisis of Global Leadership. Cambridge University Press.

Hayashi, Y. 2021. “Japan Wants U.S. Back in the TPP. It Will Likely Have to Wait.” The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/japan-wants-u-s-back-in-the-tpp-it-will-likely-have-to-wait-11618570801.

Ikenberry, G. J. 2014. “The Illusion of Geopolitics: The Enduring Power of the Liberal Order.” Foreign Affairs 93(3): 80–90. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24483408.

Ikenberry, G. J. 2018. “Why the Liberal World Order Will Survive.” Ethics & International Affairs 32(1): 17–29.

Parmar, I. 2018. “The US-Led Liberal Order: Imperialism by Another Name?” International Affairs 94(1): 151–72.

Parmar, I. 2019. “Transnational Elite Knowledge Networks: Managing American Hegemony in Turbulent Times.” Security Studies 28(3): 532–64. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09636412.2019.1604986.

Pass, J. 2019. American Hegemony in the 21st Century: A Neo Neo-Gramscian Perspective. Taylor \& Francis.

van der Pijl, K. 2018. Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War: Prism of Disaster. Manchester University Press.

Leonardo Ramos is an Associate Professor of International Relations at Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais (PUC Minas), Brazil. His publications include Gramscian IPE (The Routledge Handbook to Global Political Economy, 2020) and Caesarism, populism and 2018 election in Brazil (Capital & Class, 2020).

Filipe Mendonça is a professor of International Relations, a former vice-president of the union for UFU’s academic staff (ADUFU) who recently became the director for the local postgraduate programme on International Relations (PPGRI-UFU)

Introduction

US Hegemony, perfect storm and Biden administration

Further Reading

References

Filipe Mendonça is a professor of International Relations, a former vice-president of the union for UFU’s academic staff (ADUFU) who recently became the director for the local postgraduate programme on International Relations (PPGRI-UFU)

Leave a Reply Cancel reply