What went wrong? The liberal international order had such promise. It began with the noblest of intentions, to establish a new era of peace on the bedrock of human dignity. After the wreckage of the World Wars there seemed little alternative. Spheres of influence, power balancing, empire: all had had their day and been found wanting. Yet 80 years after the Second World War, the free world is out of steam. Autocracies are on the rise, free trade is out of fashion, democracies are eroding under the pressure of internal challenges, and the triumphalist liberal confidence of the 1990s has given way to the weary cynicism of the 2010s and 2020s.[1] Why?
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Review Essay 117
Leon Fink. Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II. Columbia University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9780231554466
Review by Paul D. Miller, Georgetown University
19 February 2025 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/RE117 | Website: rjissf.org | X: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Daniel R. Hart
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What went wrong? The liberal international order had such promise. It began with the noblest of intentions, to establish a new era of peace on the bedrock of human dignity. After the wreckage of the World Wars there seemed little alternative. Spheres of influence, power balancing, empire: all had had their day and been found wanting. Yet 80 years after the Second World War, the free world is out of steam. Autocracies are on the rise, free trade is out of fashion, democracies are eroding under the pressure of internal challenges, and the triumphalist liberal confidence of the 1990s has given way to the weary cynicism of the 2010s and 2020s.[1] Why?
Leon Fink’s Undoing the Liberal World Order seeks to provide an answer. Or at least, part of an answer, from one corner of the liberal world. The subtitle, Progressive Ideals and Political Realities since World War II, hints at the narrow scope. This is a history, not of the liberal order nor of American liberals, but of the left end of the spectrum of American liberals. It is a chronicle of the most idealistic and committed thinkers and policymakers of the left who believed in the Wilsonian vision and worked to make it a reality in the decades after 1945.[2] This means that it is largely a chronicle of their failures, defeats, and disillusionments.
Which is not to say the liberal international order is a failure. It remains the worst form of world order—except for all the others.[3] Fink is correct to note that the liberal order took shape at the dawn of the Cold War, during an unparalleled arms build-up, in between several wars, and was mostly led by presidents who felt they could not afford to indulge in liberal idealism. Because policymakers felt they had to compromise with the “political realities” of Fink’s subtitle, the reality of liberal order has rarely borne a strong resemblance to the liberal order of the visions of progressives. Fink’s thesis underscores Tony Smith’s contention that American foreign policy has been marked, at best, by “selective” liberal internationalism.[4]
Liberal ideals poked through here and there—at Bretton Woods (17-45), in the Marshall Plan, in development aid (126-164), and others.[5] Yet these case studies persuasively show the frustrations and failures of liberal internationalism as much as its influence. Undoing the Liberal World Order provides a reminder, for example, that free trade, which is now the subject of unrelenting criticism by the progressive left because of its effect on workers and the environment, was, at its outset, a liberal initiative. Fink argues that “[t]he competitive forces commonly associated with post-1970s globalization were born nearly three decades earlier, when they were generally warmly welcomed by liberal-progressive voices among the victors of World War II” (42).
Fink’s case studies make this work distinctive. Drawing on his work as a labor historian, Fink offers a trio of chapters on labor: its role in supporting Bretton Woods, in stabilizing postwar Germany (46-74), and in the formation of Israel (75-94). A later chapter explores the civil rights movement and its influence on US policy towards South Africa in the later Cold War (191-226). These case studies show the connection between domestic and foreign policy. This is a helpful corrective to the typical “black-box” approach of academic realists who bracket domestic politics in favor of their structural approach to international politics.[6] It is a healthy complement to studies of US foreign policymaking that focus exclusively on the White House Situation Room.[7]
The case studies also paint a picture of the transnational liberal movement working across lines of class, nation, and language to weave a seamless garment of liberalism at home and abroad. It is an intriguing picture, which suggests that the Communist International was not the only movement devoted to ideological proselytism. That comparison is overdrawn—one could only wish the United States and its allies spread their values half as effectively as the Communists did—but Fink’s work helps draw a history of liberalism during the Cold War that is both truly international and not focused solely on states and state actors.
Fink’s case studies successfully highlight the limitations of the liberal vision, even as he seeks to vindicate and resuscitate something of a revised liberalism for our time. That introduces a tension in his analysis: is liberalism the problem, or the solution? With some of his case studies, Fink seems to be arguing that the failure of left-liberalism was not caused by features which were intrinsic to the ideology, but because policymakers were insufficiently committed to it, or that they implemented it poorly. For example, in explaining the failure of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s economic planning, Fink points to “the difficulty in maintaining a sustainable balance” between top-down economic planning and bottom-up democratic governance (128). That is one way of putting it. One could also argue that Nehru was a socialist, and that socialism did not work in India or elsewhere. The analysis is not wrong, but it is incomplete as Fink leaves unsaid the larger, more obvious truth. The problem with Indian governance was hardly that it was insufficiently leftist.[8]
Similarly, Fink argues that in terms of national security, “left-liberals stepped carefully around,” the priorities of President Harry Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and that the “policy atmosphere hardly encouraged…major investments in New Deal-type commitments beyond Europe” (131). Containment and military spending, he posits, crowded out foreign aid at the scale left-liberalism demanded. But the US gave or loaned $55 billion to India from 1945 to 1970, according to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Green Book, one of the largest foreign aid investments in US history.[9] It is not clear what level of commitment would meet Fink’s threshold for a truly left-liberal New Deal commitment. It would be simpler to conclude that the entire model of foreign aid as the international corollary to the New Deal was broken.
Fink acknowledges that some programs “had succumbed to exaggerated expectations” and chronicles how disappointing results led to “disenchantment with ambitious, government-aided programs” (148, 157). And it might be easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to criticize the lofty expectations and the development models prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s. But the critique is not new. Samuel Huntington, as early as his seminal 1968 work, Political Order in Changing Societies, conclusively demonstrated the problematic nature of modernization theory when premised on fixed stages of growth.[10] Fink’s work chronicles growing liberal self-awareness about the problems of their own programs but does not credit contemporary voices who warned about the predictable waste of time and money.
Decades earlier, American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr rightly criticized liberalism for its “fatuous and superficial view of man,” excoriated “statesmen and guides [who] conjured up all sorts of abstract and abortive plans for the creation of perfect national and international communities,” and damned “the sentimental softness in a liberal culture [that] reveals its inability to comprehend the depth of evil to which individuals and communities may sink.”[11] The problem with left-liberalism was apparent at the time and was not only evident to later generations. Fink, in assessing the failure of liberal peace-making efforts between Israel and Palestine, concludes that “rational and implicitly secular in its inspiration, the liberal-development model could not easily accommodate messianic impulses or emotionally grounded demands that regularly emanated from either side” (185). That would have come as no surprise to Niebuhr.
Some of Fink’s choices leave this reader wanting more. By focusing exclusively on left-liberals, Fink excludes Republican and conservative contributions to these debates. Fink hails the liberals with more expansive visions of investing in governance and democracy abroad, but it was President Ronald Reagan who reshaped US foreign aid to “foster the infrastructure of democracy,” as he said in his 1982 speech at Westminster Palace, and help establish the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute.[12] Similarly, Fink praises Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton for endorsing Palestinian statehood (171-182) but does not mention that President George W. Bush did as well.[13]
The biggest omission of the book is Vietnam. Indeed, not only is there no case study of Vietnam, but Fink does not often refer to it in the other case studies. This is unfortunate because Vietnam was President John F. Kennedy’s liberal crusade before it was President Richard Nixon’s realpolitik albatross. “Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia,” Senator Kennedy said in 1956. [14] “Vietnam represents a proving ground of democracy,” concluding that, “We cannot afford to permit that experiment to fail.”[15] Vietnam was very much a liberal war at its outset and thus would seem to be a natural fit for Fink’s narrative of progressive disenchantment.[16]
Instead, to the extent Fink mentions Vietnam, it is to focus on left-liberal opposition to it and its role derailing other liberal causes. Fink writes “the Kennedy (and later [President Lyndon] Johnson) inner circle proved to be so obsessed by communism as both a military and political-diplomatic threat that it overshadowed all other foreign policy priorities and initiatives” (146). But since Communism was inimical to key liberal values, that obsession was born of liberalism, and was not a departure from it. Fink is right that liberals were divided on Vietnam, but he foregrounds the voices of anti-war left-liberals, treating them as normative or representative of a truer liberalism. Both Chester Bowles and John Kenneth Galbraith, for example, who both served as Ambassador to India, “shared [Indian] Prime Minister Nehru’s own early critique of the Vietnam War” and pushed back on the domino theory and the belief that international communism was a monolithic threat (147).
Fink’s favoring of the left-liberal viewpoint is illustrative of the book’s broader agenda. In his conclusion, Fink calls for “a liberal internationalism untied from the US military,” which seems to suggest that the military cannot (or should not) be an effective tool of liberal foreign policy (234). Some liberal triumphs, such as the conquest of Nazi Germany, came riding a Sherman tank;[17] others, like the Berlin airlift, soared on the wings of a C-130.[18] The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance among the leading liberal nations, has been the anchor of global security for nearly eight decades.[19] The internet and the Global Positioning System (GPS) network, twin engines of globalization and liberal growth, were first developed by the US military.[20] The pacification of the Balkans in the 1990s, the liberation of Kuwait, and the fall of the Soviet Union would be inconceivable without a marriage between internationalist foreign policy and American military power.
But one might argue that this would not be a truly liberal internationalism anymore by virtue of its alliance with hard power. Fink’s arguments on the United States’ military initiatives of recent decades are uneven. He criticizes the lack of “missionary zeal” in the foreign policies of presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, but also, paradoxically, is critical of the interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, Syria, and more (227). What could be more missionary than the US’s post-Cold War and post-9/11 interventionism to protect human rights and spread democracy? Here, again, the shadow of Vietnam—and Iraq and Afghanistan—hovers over the book, making all the more noteworthy their absence from the narrative. Were the failures of those wars due to an excess of liberalism, a hubristic liberal imperialism? Or did they fail because they were insufficiently liberal, too guided by cynical realism? Do we need more liberalism, or less, in our foreign policy? The book does not offer a clear answer, other than that liberalism should not be too well-armed.
Fink is right that post-Cold War internationalism has focused almost entirely on human rights, leading to a shrunken and impoverished view of how to accomplish good in other societies. Democracy needs more than a new constitution and a few elections. At its best, “American liberal engagement meant support for both democratic political allies and for welfarist plans of social achievement,” Fink writes, which is the point of many of his case studies. He goes on to argue that “[h]owever noble in themselves, humanitarian initiatives could at best save individuals, not restore democratic states or build sustainable economies” (232-233). The US needs to rediscover an active, engaged, big-government internationalism, Fink argues, in service of classically liberal ends.
This is not wrong, but the book does not explore the George W. Bush presidency, when Fink’s policy preferences were most strongly championed in recent years. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” is the best example of nation-building missionary zeal in US foreign policy in the past four decades. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” Bush said in his Second Inaugural, “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”[21] Fink’s call to invest in other societies’ stability and prosperity was echoed in the counterinsurgency era by the US military’s doctrine of reconstruction and stabilization. It is too easy to dismiss the Bush-era nation building campaigns, as most critics do, by pointing out their ultimate failure.[22] They failed, yes, but not without pockets of success and not without leaving a memory of a decade or two of life under relatively open regimes. A broadening of the scope of the book may have allowed for an appreciation of those events.[23]
But that brings us back to the role of the military in US foreign policy. There is a flavor of internationalism—a distinctly conservative internationalism—that embraces liberal goals but has none of Fink’s caveats about the military. The choice to focus on one subset of US policymakers diminishes what is otherwise a needed history of Cold War and post-Cold War aspirations and disappointments. It is unfair, of course, to critique a book for not being a different book, and Fink’s book is excellent on the terms it sets out for itself. There is an important and ongoing debate about the nature of liberalism and responsibility for its track record. Has liberalism been undone by its success?[24] Or betrayed by insufficiently committed liberals? Fink’s book is an important contribution to one corner of that broad debate and is a reminder of its longer history.
Paul D. Miller is a Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Georgetown University. He previously served in the US Army, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the White House. His newest book, Choosing Defeat: The Twenty-Year Saga of How America Lost Afghanistan, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
[1] For a selection of works on the crisis of the liberal order, see Matt Kroenig, The Return of Great Power Rivalry (Oxford University Press, 2020); Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc., (Penguin, 2024); Niall Ferguson and Fareed Zakaria, The End of the Liberal Order? (Oneworld Publications, 2017); Martin Wolf, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (Penguin, 2023); Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon, Geopolitics and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2023); Larry Bartels, Democracy Erodes From the Top (Princeton University Press, 2023); Gideon Rachman, The Age of the Strongman (Other Press, 2022); Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, Spin Dictators (Princeton University Press, 2022).
[2] A reference to President Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921). A Wilsonian vision or Wilsonianism refers to a foreign policy idealism of emphasizing the self-determination of peoples, free trade, collective security, and open diplomacy. See, for example, G. John Ikenberry, Thomas J. Knock, Anne Marie-Slaughter, and Tony Smith, eds., The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century (Princeton University Press, 2009).
[3] This turn of phrase borrows from Winston Churchill who said, “democracy is the worst form of government–except for all the others that have been tried.” Krzysztof Jasiewicz, “The Churchill Hypothesis,” Journal of Democracy 10:3 (July 1999): 168-172.
[4] Smith, America’s Mission (Princeton University Press, 2012).
[5] Named for Secretary of State George Marshall, the Marshall Plan, or the Economic Recovery Act of 1948, provided economic assistance to restore the economic infrastructure of postwar Europe. Benn Steil, The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2018).
[6] See Adrian Miroiu, “A Structural Realist Approach to International Relations Theory” in Wenceslao J. Gonzalez, ed., New Approaches to Scientific Realism (De Gruyter, 2020): page numbers
[7] See, for example, Thomas Parker, American Presidents in Diplomacy and War: Statecraft, Foreign Policy, and Leadership (University of Notre Dame Press, 2023).
[8] Jacob Abadi, “India’s Economic Policy Since Nehru: The Failure of Democratic Socialism and the March Toward Free Trade,” Journal of Third World Studies 10, no. 2 (1993): 12–35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45193436. V. Venkata Rao, “Socialist Thought of Jawaharlal Nehru.” The Indian Journal of Political Science 48, no. 2 (1987): 195–211. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41855299.
[9] In constant 2019 dollars. Figures from USAID, US Overseas Loans and Grants, https://data.usaid.gov/Administration-and-Oversight/U-S-Overseas-Loans-and-Grants-Greenbook-Data/7cnw-pw8v/about_data
[10] Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (Yale University Press, 1968).
[11] Reinhold Niebuhr, Children of Light and Children of Darkness (University of Chicago Press, 2011 [1944]), 11, 18; Niebuhr, Irony of American History (University of Chicago Press, 2008 [1952]), 173.
[12] Ronald Reagan, “Address to Members of the British Parliament,” 8 June 1982, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/address-members-british-parliament; National Democratic Institute, 2024, https://www.ndi.org/; International Republican Institute, 2024, https://www.iri.org/.
[13] “President Bush Calls for New Palestinian Leadership,” 24 June 2002, The White House, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020624-3.html.
[14] John F. Kennedy, “America’s Stake in Vietnam” speech, 1 June 1956, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum, https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/jfkpof-135-015#?image_identifier=JFKPOF-135-015-p0004.
[15] Kennedy, “America’s Stake in Vietnam.”
[16] This narrative is reflected in some recent works, such as Mark Atwood Lawrence, The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era (Princeton University Press, 2021); and Gregory Daddis, Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2017).
[17] Phillips Payson O’Brien, How the War Was Won (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
[18] “The Berlin Airlift, 1948–1949,” US Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/berlin-airlift.
[19] Timothy Andrews Sayle, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Cornell University Press, 2019).
[20] “Military Inventions That We Use Every Day,” NATO, https://www.nato.int/cps/fr/natohq/declassified_215371.htm?msg_pos=1.
[21] “President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address,” National Public Radio, 20 January 2005, https://www.npr.org/2005/01/20/4460172/president-bushs-second-inaugural-address.
[22] Jeremy Pressman, “Power without Influence: The Bush Administration’s Foreign Policy Failure in the Middle East,” International Security 33:4 (2009): 149-179, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/isec.2009.33.4.149.
[23] David Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency (Oxford University Press, 2010); John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife (University of Chicago, 2005).
[24] As recently argued by political philosopher Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018); and Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself (Yale University Press, 2023).