Old Wine, New Bottle.

• Author: Porter, Patrick

What should America's foreign policy be the day after Donald Trump? Once again, the hunt is on for a new organizing concept for statecraft. And once again, a hawkish brand of liberal internationalism reasserts itself, proposing an "Open World." Its defects should now be familiar, even if its purveyors insist their version of it is fresh. Yet a foreign policy organized around this idea, of U.S.-led democracies battling dictatorships, will create conditions for a world at war.

In the U.S. marketplace of ideas, a renewed "Cold War liberalism" is on offer. It takes dead aim at authoritarianism everywhere. Its organizing principle is that "regime type," at home and abroad, should determine how America defines its interests. America's overriding security problem, it suggests, is the absence or thwarting of democracy. The antidote it offers is the advancement of democracy.

There is every indication that this evangelist outlook will inform the doctrine, if not always the practice, of any post-Trump foreign policy under a Democratic presidency. For President Joe Biden, America must "lead" again. "The triumph of democracy and liberalism over fascism and autocracy created the free world," Biden stated, adding that "this contest does not just define our past. It will define our future, as well." Biden's policy platform promises a "Global Summit for Democracy" to bring together the world's free states and to bring forth "civil society organizations" to stand on the frontline to defend democracy. He has vowed to support Kremlin opponents within Russia. His secretary of state, Antony Blinken, in 2019 proposed a "league of democracies." The Center for American Progress, a hawkish liberal think tank closely tied to the Democratic Party, calls for "defending democracy and pushing back on authoritarian competitors as a vital national interest." While it calls for "humility" and disavows "discredited notions of regime change," it states the world will be safer and more prosperous with "more democracies," and summons the United States to bolster democratic allies against authoritarian adversaries with arms sales, training, and technology, as well as systematically pressuring countries to uphold human rights and international law. A humble program of ideological competition and democratic expansion, then.

Likewise, in both scholarly and popular literature are calls for a renewed contest between democracy and authoritarianism. Some of the liveliest Atlanticist minds--Tim Snyder, Alexander Vindman, Matthew Kroenig, and Robert Kagan--call on America to lead a league of democracies against the tyranny of an aggregated enemy: authoritarianism, or even "illiberalism." Any American retrenchment, they warn, would lead to perilous advances of authoritarianism across the globe. They may claim not to be asserting American dominance from an earlier era. But even in a more polycentric world, they insist on American preeminence and attribute failures not to American exceptionalism, but to departures from it, calling for a renewed focus on the internal character of foreign regimes.

The most developed version of this argument is a sweeping new vision for U.S. statecraft by Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper, who argue that Washington should pursue a transformative policy to create an "Open World." This design would reimagine, rather than restore, the lamented "liberal international order." This doctrine would reorganize America's efforts around opposition to authoritarian great powers, making the globe more "accessible." As the United States can only remain secure and prosperous within a free and open international system, it should collaborate with its allies and partners to "modernize international institutions," as the international order is "vital in confronting such existential threats as climate change and global pandemics."

They acknowledge that while the United States remains powerful on most measures, its relative power has declined compared to near-peer rivals like China. Faced with these drawbacks, the authors caution against hubris, chasing military primacy, and spreading universal liberalism. Likewise, neither nostalgia for the "old liberal order nor an isolationist retrenchment" will do. There must instead be an "affirmative vision for an international order that allies and partners can embrace." This vision, they argue, can secure America without a future of militarized crises and imperial overstretch. But constraints observed quickly fall away. Failure...