Global Order after Ukraine.

• Author: Tierney, Dominic

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February was a full-scale assault on the global liberal order that seeks to diminish war and promote democracy, human rights, and free trade. Harking back to an era of overt aggression and imperialism before 1945, Moscow launched a brutal campaign to conquer a weaker neighbor. But the war also triggered a massive Western effort to sanction Russia and aid Ukraine. Will the Russian invasion ultimately strengthen or weaken America and its allies?

To answer this question, we should distinguish between the international and domestic sources of liberal order. Internationally, the war has glued together the U.S.-led system of alliances and institutions. At the domestic American level, however, the glue has been much less evenly applied. The Russian threat is too distant and ambiguous to overcome deepseated polarization in the United States or convince populist conservatives to invest in the liberal order. The Ukraine War has strengthened global order, but these gains remain vulnerable, and the weak spot lies within America.

After World War II, the United States and its partners constructed, in John Ikenberry's words, "a multifaceted and sprawling international order, organized around economic openness, multilateral institutions, security cooperation and democratic solidarity." That order aimed to create a virtuous cycle where a network of democracies would trade more and build more institutions, in turn entrenching representative government and free markets around the world, creating an expanding zone of peace.

Many forces spurred the global liberal order, from technological change to individual architects like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. The most important motor was threat, or the emergence in the 1940s of three dangerous great powers: Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. Kyle Lascurettes has shown in his book Orders of Exclusion that, over the centuries, international orders were often created to contain a threat, from the state sovereignty order after the Thirty Years' War (designed to check the universalist claims of the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy) and the Concert system after the Napoleonic Wars (which aimed to safeguard conservative monarchies), through the Wilsonian vision of national selfdetermination after World War I (a counter to the Bolshevik message).

In the same vein, in the 1940s, the grave peril from Berlin, Tokyo, and Moscow motivated the United States and its partners to put aside their differences, overcome the temptation to focus on domestic issues, and establish a global liberal order. The democracies had a choice: hang together or hang separately. Washington helped construct institutions like the United Nations (which began as a wartime alliance), the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The United States provided friendly states with access to the U.S. market, as well as economic aid through the Marshall Plan. In turn, the looming specter of the Red Army spurred allies to accept a prolonged American military presence on their soil and encouraged European states to integrate their economies in the European Community (which evolved into the European Union, or EU). All these initiatives had an idealistic hew, but none of them would have occurred without a security threat.

Extreme danger in the 1940s also transformed domestic U.S. politics. Americans cast aside interwar isolationism, supported the campaign in World War II as well as the global struggle against communism, rallied together in an exceptional era of bipartisanship, and backed a huge expansion of the federal government (which increased in size tenfold during World War II). The fascist and communist peril had a particularly...