Death Knell Of Liberal Internationalism

"Liberal internationalism died in the ruins of Gaza and Beirut. Donald Trump's return to office has only put a tin plate on the coffin."  Thus opens Anatol Lieven's forceful critique of U.S. liberal internationalism, the belief that the U.S. can secure global peace by spreading democracy and exerting American military power. (Link below left)  Lieven argues that liberal internationalism has collapsed morally and practically. It has become indistinguishable from imperialism, and progressives must abandon it in favor of a realist internationalism grounded in peace, restraint, and respect for other nations’ interests.

In his Harper's Magazine article, the British policy analyst takes on both Republicans and Democrats beholden to a distorted view of American exceptionalism, which had become the guiding premise of liberal internationalism.  The decades-long march to this point was capped off by President Joe Biden's support of Israeli aggression in the Middle East.  Like many centrist Democrats, Biden was blind to the enormity of Israel's war crimes in Gaza and to its grossly disproportionate response to Hezbollah in Lebanon.  The former has resulted in more than 71,000 confirmed deaths (so far) with the vast majority of them civilians.  The latter was carried out on the eve of ceasefire meetings meant to reduce hostilities.  

Many other Western leaders failed to respond, but it was the Biden Administration that sent the weapons and bombs to Israel to continue the genocide in Gaza.  Beyond his moral blindness, Biden was warned by numerous political analysts* that his Gaza policy could cost him (or, as it turned out, Kamala Harris) the 2024 election and that, with the election of Donald Trump, could cost us our democracy.

And here we are in 2026.  Donald Trump is in power**, abducting the elected president of a sovereign nation, threatening the sovereignty of other nations ("Who's going to stop us?"), promoting ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and - oh by the way - dismantling American democracy by his contempt for the Constitution.  

As Anatol Lieven points out, this moral and practical decline was a long time coming due to its reliance on US military power and the many contradictions between our professed values and actions.  The final nail in the coffin of liberal internationalism was America's support for or silence about Israeli actions in Gaza and Lebanon during the Biden Administration. Trump is just the "tin plate" on the coffin.

Lieven writes that neoconservatives, such as those who brought us the Iraq War, migrated back to the Democratic Party during the first Trump era.*** Their shared language with the liberal internationalists —“rules-based order,” “democracy promotion,” “human rights”— was used to justify interventions aimed at weakening rival states and set the stage for Trump's nationalism.  Progressives must break decisively from this neocon mindset because without this clean break, progressives have no credible alternative to Trump’s nationalism.  They must also re-establish the intellectual foundation needed to address global challenges that require cooperation, such as climate change, nuclear arms control, pandemics, and space and AI militarization.

If the core problem is the moral arrogance that embraced a distorted American exceptionalism, Lieven proposes a solution - what he terms  "realistic internationalism".  He argues that U.S. liberal internationalism has become a moralized form of imperialism. To meet the challenges of the 21st century, progressives must abandon it and embrace a realist internationalism grounded in peace, humility, and cooperation among major powers: 

• Peace, not democracy per se, is the foundation of international progress because democracies as well authoritarian states can pose a threat to peace.

• The maintenance of peace requires all powerful states not only to observe certain rules but to respect each other's vital interests.

• Most importantly: "Internationalism is what the word says: internationalism - that is cooperation among nation states, not a hegemonic United States and its client states telling the rest of the world what to do." 

With the GOP controlled by an extremist, nationalist MAGA contingent, the project to restore America's international reputation among the peoples of the world and to take its place as an actual  force for good relies on the Democratic Party re-defining itself.  Moneyed interests and lobbies such as the defense industry and AIPAC must be denounced and not allowed to buy influence with their campaign donations.  Corporate democrats must be challenged in primaries at every level.  Money spent on defense and war must be rechanneled into programs that benefit the common good.  No longer should Democrats try to outspend Republicans on the tools of war.  

Some of our country's greatest leaders have warned us about the cost of American imperialism and militarism, among them Martin Luther King Jr and President Dwight D. Eisenhower.  

MLK's legacy of non-violence in the area of civil rights is remembered to this day.  What is sometimes forgotten is his opposition to the Vietnam War and US militarism.   Exactly one year before his death, he delivered an impassioned condemnation of militarism at Riverside Church in New York City.  In that speech, King called the US government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today", as well as the leading exponent of "the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long."  

King recognized that the Vietnam War was "a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit." He insisted that no significant social problem - wealth inequality, gun violence, racial strife - could be resolved while the US remains "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift." It was a recipe, he said, for certain "spiritual death".  He warned that America's soul "can never be saved...so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over."

A decade before King's impassioned plea for the United States to live up to its highest ideals,  President Dwight D. Eisenhower, formerly the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during WWII, warned of the dangers and costs of the growing military-industrial complex.  "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

Before closing his article, Lieven also quotes President Eisenhower: "This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

President Eisenhower was a Republican - a moderate who today would no longer have a place in the MAGA-Republican Party.  If any correction to America's morally bankrupt foreign policy, it will most certainly not come from the GOP.  

As for the Democrats, they need to stop competing with Republicans as to who has the "toughest" foreign policy or who can spend the most on the military.  They need to forge a new way forward to a realist internationalism grounded in peace, restraint, and respect for other nations’ interests.  They need to reaffirm a commitment to international law and cut ties with malign special interest groups that endorse violations of international law.  

Just as the distorted exceptionalism that places our nation above international law and in violation of our own democratic principles is a repudiation of our values, so too are the cuts to economic and development aid executed in first months of the Trump Administration.   Our country, if it chooses, can indeed play an exceptional role in world affairs.  What nation is better equipped to address the poverty, disease, and hunger that plague so many in the Global South? 

Notes

*Most notably, Ian Bremmer — president of Eurasia Group and one of the most prominent U.S. geopolitical analysts — repeatedly argued in late 2023 and throughout 2024 that Biden’s Gaza policy could cost him the 2024 election by alienating much of his base - young voters, Arab and Muslim Americans, progressives, left‑leaning Jewish voters, and Black voters who viewed Gaza through a racial‑justice lens.  Bremmer also warned that a Trump return to power would pose a direct threat to American democratic institutions.  

**How big a role Gaza played in Trump's victory over Harris may be subject to debate.  But what is not in doubt is the lack of enthusiasm of the Democratic base for Harris, who never distanced herself from Biden's Gaza policy.  Harris received 6.3 million less votes than pre-Gaza Biden did in 2020 and was the first Democrat to lose the presidential popular vote in 20 years.

***The neocons' Project for the New American Century dovetails nicely with Madeline Albright's "indispensable nation" concept - "If we have to use force, it is because it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation."