Liberal hegemony,international order,and US foreign policy: A reconsideration

Strategic restraint: More prescription than prediction

A central argument in After Victory is that dominant states create and maintain durable orders by resisting the temptation to exercise power. The argument for strategic restraint is counterintuitive, especially for realist theory, which holds that the greater the asymmetry in relative power, the greater is the imperial temptation for dominant states. Ikenberry offers a different logic – precisely because they enjoy a surplus of capabilities, dominant states can invest in the future by foregoing the opportunity to exploit their power advantage in the present. By exercising self-restraint and especially by binding themselves within international institutions, dominant states can lock others into a durable order. Subordinate states, in this bargain, gain reassurance that they will not be dominated, and that hegemonic power will be exercised predictably and responsibly. The greater the power asymmetries, the greater the incentives for each side to strike a bargain resting on hegemonic restraint. Strategic restraint, Ikenberry argues, is the ‘passport’ away from imperial domination or balancing and towards more consensual or ‘constitutional’ forms of order (Ikenberry, 2001: 52–64, 2018: 4–6).

Ikenberry offers a subtle and sophisticated way to think about hegemonic power, one that has influenced the research programme of scholars of hegemony and order. Ian Clark (2011), for example, draws on the ideas of strategic restraint and legitimate consent to conceptualise hegemony as a mechanism of international order and an institution, one that Hedley Bull neglected, of international society. Similarly, Evelyn Goh (2013) builds her account of order in contemporary East Asia on the idea that hegemonic states must continually legitimise their unequal power to other states by striking bargains, or social compacts, of mutual benefit.

After Victory’s argument for hegemonic restraint was intended as predictive and prescriptive. The prescriptive significance was immediately apparent. After Victory was published just before the George W. Bush administration demonstrated a preference for unilateralism and disregard of alliance norms by intervening in Afghanistan and, more controversially, Iraq. The global backlash that followed highlighted the importance of the strategic restraint argument in academic and policy circles. Similarly, Ikenberry (2017) has played the role of public intellectual and defender of liberal hegemony in the face of Donald Trump’s assault on the postwar American-led order.

States interested in sustaining hegemony should exercise strategic restraint, but to what extent do they? The postwar United States is the key example in Ikenberry’s argument. He argues that democratic states are especially prone to exercise restraint, and thus expects the United States, as an advanced liberal democracy striking bargains with other democracies, to exhibit it. America’s history and domestic institutions only strengthen the expectation. The US political system – with decentralised checks and balances, shared power across branches of government, and a long tradition of suspicion of executive authority – was founded and operates on power restraints.

Ikenberry’s (2001: Chapters 6 and 7) claim that America exercised strategic restraint is central to his account of the post-1945 settlement and his explanation for the durability of the US-led liberal order during and after the Cold War. Yet, an examination of US hegemonic behaviour suggests the self-restraint impulse did not operate as powerfully as After Victory presumes. Three illustrations indicate the gap between argument and evidence.

The first concerns the origins of the post-1945 settlement. Ikenberry rightly shows that the dominant United States and its weakened European allies struck and institutionalised a bargain across economics and security. What is less clear is whether that bargain was founded on the presumed logic of hegemonic self-restraint. The problem after 1945 was not that a disproportionately powerful America was tempted to exercise its new-found power and dominate its weaker partners. On the contrary, US policy makers expressed profound ambivalence, as they had historically, over whether to engage more permanently in European affairs. European states rightly feared not dominance but abandonment. Rather than strike a bargain to restrain US power, they struck one that committed the United States to exercise its power, despite its ambivalence, and create an ‘empire by invitation’ (Lundestad, 1986). After Victory recognises that Europe’s concern was abandonment rather than domination (Ikenberry, 2001: 165). But it does not address the confounding implications for the causal logic of strategic restraint.

Second, over the course of the postwar era, what is perhaps most striking in its relations with major allies is America’s purposeful lack of self-restraint. Given the timing of After Victory’s publication, Ikenberry (2004, 2018) understandably struggled to account for the eagerness with which the United States broke free of institutional constraints and defied alliance partners between 11 September 2001 and the 2003 Iraq War. But that episode was hardly an outlier. The 1971 Nixon ‘shocks’ were even more dramatic; the United States abruptly, unilaterally and coercively overturned the Bretton Woods arrangement that was central to its original postwar settlement. In 1981–1982, the Reagan administration discarded the prior two-track commitment that its European allies considered essential to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and announced it was no longer interested in East-West arms control. During the 1980s and early 1990s, different US administrations adopted ‘aggressive unilateralism’ in defiance of the rules and norms of the global trade regime. From the vantage point of Tokyo, Bonn, or Paris, it would be difficult to characterise the United States as a restrained hegemon save perhaps at the policy extremes – America neither sought to impose formal imperial control over its allies nor to balance against them. Rather than strategic restraint and a principled commitment to international institutions, US behaviour has been marked by the expectation of hegemonic privilege to both make and break international rules, and by a pragmatic and instrumental approach to international institutions, using or evading them depending on whether they serve US interests (Mastanduno, 2009).

The Iraq War prompted Ikenberry (2018) to step back from the strong version of his strategic restraint argument that the United States is truly tied down by the postwar bargains it struck, to a weaker version, namely that the United States can break out, but pays a price. This qualification is a sensible one, and we can take the sequence further to showcase the force of After Victory’s overall argument about consensual hegemony. The postwar United States not only paid a price, in tacit recognition of the ties that bind, it sought to make amends following its hegemonic transgressions. The Nixon shocks were quickly followed by the Smithsonian Agreement, which modified but restored monetary cooperation. Reagan returned to arms control and détente in his second term, and George W. Bush downplayed unilateralism and emphasised multilateralism in his. Obama followed up for good measure with what was derided as an ‘apology tour’ in his first year after Bush. Aggressive unilateralism in trade policy was followed by a US commitment to the new World Trade Organization (WTO) and its enhanced dispute settlement mechanism. The compulsion to make amends reinforces the core logic of After Victory – for a hegemonic order to endure requires the leading state to provide ongoing reassurance to insecure partners.

Third, in After Victory’s conceptualisation, the end of the Cold War necessitated a postwar settlement between the victor and the vanquished in a context of significant power asymmetry. The United States needed to exercise restraint, and Russia needed assurances so that it could join the US-led liberal order rather than simmer in resentment outside it. The thrust of US policy over two decades, however, constituted the opposite of strategic restraint. Rather than use existing institutions to integrate Russia, the United States used them to dominate it. It took advantage of Russia’s weakness to expand NATO to Russia’s doorstep, and it terminated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to pursue missile defence in Europe and Asia. Rather than offer a Marshall Plan-like programme for Russia’s tattered economy, the United States outsourced assistance to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which administered ‘shock therapy’ to the Russian economy according to the standard formula it applied to any developing country. To account for this behaviour unanticipated by his theory, Ikenberry argued, in my view unpersuasively, that domestic interest groups and an inflated sense of unipolar prerogative temporarily created a US policy that ‘lost its sense of restraint and sensitivity to the interests of others’ (Deudney and Ikenberry, 2009: 49). His prescription was for the United States to adopt a ‘higher liberalism’ and recast US-Russia relations.

The concept of strategic restraint is crucial to understanding how hegemonic power operates. The next step is to address the circumstances under which restraint is or is not employed, and with what consequences. After Victory opened the door to that research effort.

The durability of America’s postwar order: Partners matter

After Victory made an enduring impact by emphasising the distinctive features of different hegemonic orders. It shifted our focus beyond hegemonic stability theory, which implied that hegemonic states were interchangeable as long as they carried out the functional tasks required to manage a liberal world economy. For Ikenberry, hegemony is less about function and more about order, and order is deeply affected by the character and values of the hegemonic state. Recent scholarship has built on this insight by contrasting hegemonic styles and orders, including differences among liberal ones (Clark, 2011; Parchami, 2009; Zhang, 2015).

Ikenberry emphasises the distinctive American features of the postwar order. The US-centred order that evolved during the Cold War was regional, focusing on North America, Western Europe, and Japan. Although the order expanded somewhat after the Soviet collapse, the states of Europe and Japan remain the key US partners. Liberalism is the order’s defining feature; to be a core member of the club requires a democratic political system and market-based economy. After Victory focuses on how the distinctive features of American liberalism inform the order and facilitate its operation. America’s democracy is open, transparent, and decentralised; these features enable other states to participate in the US hegemonic project and gain a voice in the management of the system. As Ikenberry (2001: 203) states, ‘the American postwar order was an open or penetrated hegemony, an extended system that blurred domestic and international politics as it created an elaborate transnational and trans-governmental political system with the United States at its centre’.

American hegemony is liberal hegemony. During the Cold War, trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific cooperation was supported by both domestic regime type and the need to contain the Soviet Union. Liberals and realists could each point to their preferred explanation. For Ikenberry, the persistence of the US-centred alliance systems beyond the Cold War points to liberalism, and particularly the American style of liberal hegemony, as the key variable.

It is worth considering, however, whether the durability of the US order beyond the Cold War has more to do with the exceptional geopolitical trajectories of America’s two most important partners, Germany and Japan, than with the distinctive features of US-style hegemony. Realists were surprised by the maintenance of Cold War alliances after 1990 not because they misunderstood US behaviour – the United States, as expected, maintained its hegemonic (or unipolar) status and privileges – but because they incorrectly expected Japan and Germany to revert to ‘normal’ great power status (Mearsheimer, 1990; Waltz, 1993). As Ikenberry (2001: 250–251) notes, in the postwar settlement both countries ‘accepted unprecedented constitutional limits on their military capacity and independence’, and became ‘unusually dependent’ on US-led institutions. The most striking feature of contemporary world politics is that these two eligible great powers have proven content, 70 years after it was imposed on them, to retain their ‘semi-sovereign’ status.

Today, Ikenberry’s inference that Japan and Germany have remained partial powers due to the character of US hegemony is more plausible than the realist expectation that ‘sooner or later’ they will break out. Yet, Germany and Japan are exceptional even in terms of Ikenberry’s argument. He observes that one reason secondary states are willing to strike bargains with hegemons when they are weak is that in the future they will have the opportunity to modify the institutional bargain to reflect changed power realities (Ikenberry, 2018). Power realities and the international landscape have shifted far more significantly than has the eagerness of Germany and Japan to renegotiate. Instead, they continue to embrace the postwar bargain and their subordinate role within it, and even appear more committed to the US-centred international order than the United States itself. Germany’s and Japan’s reaction to Trump’s discarding of that order has not been to seize the opportunity to extricate themselves from dependence; instead, they appear determined to defend America’s order and the values embedded within it until the United States returns to its senses and reassumes its leadership role (Berger et al, 2017).

After Victory takes a long historical view of great power behaviour. In that context, Japan and Germany are the great historical exceptions. It is hard to imagine the persistence of the US order in its current form had either or both decided to take the traditional great power route. Their extraordinary trajectory also illuminates the challenge of extending the US order to incorporate other major powers. Contemporary China and Russia look less like postwar Germany and Japan and more like the traditionally ambitious and autonomous great powers found elsewhere in Ikenberry’s historical drama, despite living in the era of liberal order with the option to participate as supporting partners of US hegemony.

China and the US-led order: Integration or power transition?

The analytical reach of After Victory enables its arguments to be relevant to one of the most important developments in contemporary world politics, the rise of China. After Victory did not address China’s rise directly, but Ikenberry extrapolated and applied its arguments in subsequent publications. During the mid-2000s, he made a strong case that China could and would be integrated into the liberal world order which was, in his well-known phrase, ‘easy to join and hard to overturn’. As a rising power, China confronted an international order very different from those of the past – ‘a Western-centered system that is open, integrated, and rule-based, with wide and deep political foundations’ (Ikenberry, 2008). China was rising within that order rather than challenging it, and the contemporary order, unlike previous ones, had a remarkable capacity to accommodate rising powers.

By 2018, of course, China’s relationship with the US-led order looks somewhat different. China has become more authoritarian rather than, as liberal theory expected or hoped, evolved in a democratic direction. It has built its military capability, asserted itself regionally, and signalled a willingness to challenge US rule-making authority. Nevertheless, Ikenberry contends that pessimistic realist theories of power transition need not apply. He argues the postwar liberal order sketched in After Victory is unusually durable in the face of power shifts and accommodates a diversity of ideologies and development models. Moreover, the order offers a buffet of options; China need not accept all of it, it can pick and choose some rules and institutions but not others, and still be a faithful member (Ikenberry, 2018).

That last formulation draws us to the heart of the liberal-realist debate over international order. For realists, international orders are created by dominant states to reflect their interests and values and challenged by rising states with different values and interests who wish to redistribute international influence and status. For Ikenberry (2018), the postwar liberal order began as an American order, but now has taken on a life of its own – ‘the United States does not embody the international order, it has a relationship with it, as do rising states’. In this sense, the liberal logic of After Victory tracks with that of After Hegemony, which argued the international regimes created by US power developed over time their own autonomy and thus could outlive the decline of US power (Keohane, 1984). Ikenberry’s order is multi-layered and flexible; it has ‘integrative tendencies’ and offers opportunities for shared leadership. In short, realists see power shaping and reshaping order; liberals see order accommodating power.

In the current context, realists see two problems with the conception of international order as a flexible buffet with states selecting their preferred items. First, as China becomes more powerful it will want to reshape the order to reflect its own preferences, not simply pick and choose among the existing order’s features, because some of those features will frustrate its preferences. In trade, China prefers ‘at the border’ regulations, rather than the ‘behind the border’ regulations advanced by the United States and its allies. In geopolitics, China cannot simply select to be the dominant power in East Asia; the United States already occupies that position and is unlikely to relinquish it. And, if the current order is truly a liberal one, can it accommodate an authoritarian state as one of its most powerful?

That question raises the second realist problem – as China becomes more powerful, the United States will become more reluctant to tolerate its selective embrace of the liberal order. During the 1990s, the United States accepted a mercantilist, authoritarian China with the hope that as it was integrating into the order it was also transforming into a responsible stakeholder internationally and a pluralist regime domestically. By 2018, the United States abandoned that hope and seems prepared to confront China geopolitically and economically.

Does power determine order, or does order socialise power? The logic of After Victory forces us to confront that question, and the rise of China is the great experiment that will show us how it plays out.

Is the contemporary order self-reinforcing or self-defeating?

After Victory takes a clear position in another key IR debate, over the durability of the existing order. Gilpin (1981) argued most forcefully that liberal hegemonic orders carry the seeds of their own destruction. Liberal leaders succumb to corruption and complacency at home, and the openness of the order they create transfers their economic and technological advantages to rising powers abroad. For Ikenberry, however, liberal orders are self-reinforcing and become robust over time. Path dependencies and ‘increasing returns to institutions’ enable liberal orders to gain momentum and build on existing strengths. As more and more actors participate in and benefit from the order, the costs of disrupting or changing it increase (Ikenberry, 2001: 69–79). Once established, liberal orders endure and flourish; again, they are easy to join and hard to overturn.

Developments during the 1990s seemed to confirm this logic. Regional institutions at the heart of the Cold War trans-Atlantic bargain, NATO and the European Union, not only persisted, they expanded their membership. The liberal order was a club many wanted to join. Democracy and the economic liberalism enshrined in the Washington Consensus marched forward. Over the past decade, however, the tide seems to have turned. Brexit shocked the European Union, and Americans elected a President who expressed hostility towards and disdain for the liberal order and America’s special obligations within it. Populists and nationalists are challenging some of the pillars of liberal order including free trade, open borders, and a vibrant free press. The timing of these developments, coming long after the liberal order has been institutionalised and expanded, leads us to question After Victory’s optimistic projection of increasing returns. Today the liberal order appears less like a snowball rolling downhill and more like a bicyclist struggling to get uphill.

Domestic politics help us understand liberal order’s current predicament. After Victory took us to the state level to focus on domestic structures. The open, transnational, and collaborative character of democratic regimes reinforced the liberal order. However, the argument paid less attention to domestic interests. Who benefits from the liberal order, and who is left behind? That question all but disappeared during the 1990s as the proponents of liberal internationalism celebrated globalisation and proclaimed its benefits to be nearly universal. Twenty years later, the picture looks very different. At the trans-Atlantic core, significant parts of the electorate have concluded that the liberal internationalism is a project promoted by elites for their own benefit.

After Victory focused sensibly on great powers as engines of international change. Today, the challenge to liberal order comes both from successful authoritarianism abroad and economic and political discontent at home. The current cycle seems to favour Gilpin, but the next decade should test After Victory’s confidence in the flexibility and resiliency of the US-centred order.

A concluding thought

After Victory made an enduring contribution by shaping some of the biggest questions and debates in our field, including the behaviour of hegemonic states, the creation and durability of international orders, and the nature of power transitions. It manages both to integrate leading theoretical paradigms – the analysis ranges comfortably across liberal, realist, and constructivist insights – and to sharpen the distinctions and points of debate across them. It settles clearly on an eloquent statement of liberalism’s progressive, as opposed to realism’s cyclical, approach to IR. Relatively few books in IR have a ‘shelf life’ measured in decades. The ones that do ask big questions at the heart of our scholarly enterprise and provide illuminating, if always contestable, answers to them.