United States, explained.
The White House complex is surrounded by temporary fencing for the upcoming inauguration ceremony of President-elect Donald Trump (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
As Trump returns to power, international instability is the “new normal”.
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What would the founders of the US-led liberal international order think?What would the founders of the US-led liberal international order think?
Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on 20 January is an appropriate time to reflect on the current state of international politics. One word immediately springs to mind – instability. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.
At the outset of the post-Cold War era in 1991, a bipartisan Democratic and Republican Party consensus underpinned the US-led liberal international order, holding out the promise of a new era based on greater levels of free trade and liberal democratic-based peace.
After three decades, the experiment has been tested and found badly wanting.
Consider some major developments in recent years.
The global health pandemic that originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan shut down travel and significantly reduced world trade and social interaction for three years.
Fractious international relationships have not improved. The US-China relationship – which had moved from one based on “engagement” to “strategic competition” in 2017 – was dealt a further blow as both sides deepened their rivalry across the economic and military spheres.
Rivalry has extended to the choice of friends.
The United States has been at war for 23 of the 35 years since the end of the Cold War.
Departing US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns recently argued that in its relationships with Russia, Iran, and North Korea, China was “aligning themselves with the most unreliable agents of disorder in the international system.” In contrast, China views its relationships with these states as strategic assets in their own right and as a balance to US power.
Beijing and Washington are on opposite sides of the most recent example of great power politics – Russia’s war against Ukraine, launched in February 2022. The US-led NATO has backed Kyiv while Moscow has received military troop support from North Korea and increased economic, diplomatic, and military cooperation with China.
Great power subversion is making a comeback, seen in the extensive use of propaganda, disinformation, the arming and funding of insurgents, and infrastructure sabotage.
Instability extends beyond the province of the so-called “great powers”.
The problems in Canada’s relations with India are only the most recent example of the return of an egregious practice – the violation of international laws against state-sponsored assassination that shot to prominence in 2017 with North Korea, and Saudi Arabia in 2018.
And then there’s the Middle East since 7 October 2023, a region where conflict has escalated to a new level of ferocity.
It is not simply a case of revisionist actors rocking the international system. The United States has agency too. The original architects of the US international order would be aghast at the role that successive US administrations in the post-Cold War era have played in destabilising the international system that they carefully constructed.
The United States has been at war for 23 of the 35 years since the end of the Cold War.
When viewed in this context, Trump is as much a symptom as he is a contributor to the current era of instability. His rise to power represents larger structural forces, notably the specific weaknesses associated with the US version of capitalism, and the generic great power problem of over-extension, albeit with American characteristics.
Trump’s re-election in 2024 is a reminder that the basic problems in the US political system that propelled him to his first presidency in 2017–20 remain.
While Trump’s recent sweeping claims on Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal may simply be the first round of a bargaining process that even he doesn’t believe to be credible, his revisionist state rhetoric has to be treated as a serious challenge to the sovereignty principle that underpins international relations.
Trump has been aided in his recent contributions to international instability by none other than the tycoon Elon Musk, who has been appointed to a prominent position to rein in government spending in the incoming Trump administration.
Musk has courted political controversy in the United Kingdom and Germany in recent weeks. A recent op-ed he penned in a German newspaper unambiguously backed the AfD party, whose commitment to liberal democratic principles has been seriously questioned by mainstream German parties. His posts on the Musk-owned platform X have cast serious aspersions on UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer even as reports suggest that Musk is seeking to play a significant role in British politics.
The serious challenges to stability posed by the examples highlighted here and the eroding US commitment to upholding international order is not an encouraging sign.
If the United States doesn’t defend the international system it created in the ashes of the Second World War then we are in truly uncharted territory.
About the author
Nicholas Khoo
Nicholas Khoo is Associate Professor of International Politics, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand and Principal Research Fellow, Institute for Indo-Pacific Affairs, Christchurch, New Zealand.
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