Moralism and American Foreign Policy: Biden’s Greatest Challenge to Reviving U.S. Primacy
Abstract
American hegemony has shaped world affairs for decades. But observers now anticipate a fundamental, system-changing shift to a post-American, multi-polar international order in which the co-ordinates of geopolitical power will transfer to China or regional hegemons in Eurasia, with the United States becoming overall less influential on the world stage (Brooks and Wohlforth, 2016:3-8).
Conceptions of American strength and decline are often analysed in terms of its material capabilities such as economic vitality and hard power resources. This paper explores both the materialistic and intangible elements of U.S. preponderance and addresses the reasons why they are exposed to ‘counter-hegemonic’ challenges. Specifically, it acknowledges that a crisis of consent is evident across three inherently related spheres, affecting America’s relationship with the world. Firstly, it will review the challenge of decreased consent for economic liberalisation (neoliberal globalization). Secondly, it will illustrate declining consent for the U.S. to act as the world’s ‘system maker’, providing the operating logic of the global political economy (neoliberal institutionalism). Thirdly, the core argument of this paper proposes that the most direct contemporary threat to U.S. primacy is a decrease in America’s intangible capital, such as its legitimacy and moral power, which is due to the abandonment of its exceptionalist narrative on promoting universal consent for democracy, which risks creating a ‘moral equivalency’ with authoritarian challengers in a new era of intense geopolitical and ideological rivalry.
Introduction
The January insurrection in Washington, in which domestic terrorists were incited to violence by President Trump’s reckless rabble-rousing, breached the boundaries of acceptable political conduct. It attempted to legitimise anti-democratic behaviour and further diminished the credibility of the U.S. to act as the global leader. The West’s decline and China’s rise is often measured in quantifiable economic criteria and there is no doubt that there are important material challenges to U.S. primacy and national security, which this paper will explore. However, a wave of ideological change at the geopolitical level is more likely to destabilise America’s hegemony. The insurgency on January 6th 2021 in which five people died, and elected officials had to be evacuated from the Capitol building, was a gift to authoritarian propagandists and marked the nadir of an administration which has constantly undermined its own security and the liberal world order. President Trump presented a starkly nationalist agenda, retrenching from international commitments, and removing an over-riding moral purpose from America’s foreign policy discourse.
This paper will set-out that the Jeffersonian premise of “Acting for All Mankind”, by protecting democratic norms and human rights, has never been merely an ‘optional’ liberal project, but has provided the justification for American dominance (Kissinger, 2014:236). As Trump dismantled America’s powerful moral framework, this paper explains how in discarding those values, guarantees and global public goods in its foreign policy arena, amidst the increasing but inchoate material strength of China and other authoritarian regimes, he has jeopardised U.S. hegemony. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, America’s role in the world is in doubt.
Challenge One: The Crisis of Consent for Globalization
For context, this paper first sets out to examine the economic and social dislocations of globalization which present material challenges to U.S. primacy, and provided the precondition for Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of nationalism. The first challenge to U.S. primacy emerges from the counter-currents of the American-led political-economic doctrine of neoliberalism. This policy framework rejected the previous protectionist paradigm of Bretton Woods, which restricted transnational financial flows and enabled productive capacity to flourish within nation-states through tariff walls and import substitution, also providing space for progressive welfare reforms (Babic, 2020:773, Keily, 2005:88-92). The ‘Washington Consensus’, a post-1989 organising concept in economic policy, increased the velocity of neoliberalism as a form of ‘market fundamentalism’. This approach advocated that politics should simply get out of the way of the ’Invisible Hand’, which would be achieved through influencing national economic policies around the world and coercing structural adjustments that diminished the role of the state, such as the deregulation of financial markets and the removal of uncompetitive barriers and social protections. This in turn facilitated unrestricted capital flows and the trans-nationalisation of production. The one-dimensional privileging of capital accumulation over social ‘safety nets’ perpetuated the concentration of wealth, and reinforced inequalities within and between nations. Two inter-related trends emerged from this period of hyper-globalization which now underpin America’s declinist narrative: they are China’s economic rise and the dislocation of western industries and jobs.
Economic inequality and de-industrialisation in the U.S. has accelerated since the 1990’s, with real average household incomes stagnating (DeSilver, 2018). The economic failures of neoliberalism and free trade fuelled Trump’s protectionist ‘solutions’ and his America First rhetoric, which was so appealing to disenchanted voters in the abandoned ‘rust belt’. Manipulating these grievances provided a platform for Trump to acquire votes and mobilize society around a perceived sense of national injury. However, whilst his bombast on strategic nationalism struck a chord with the electorate, his policies have often acted against the interests of his blue-collar base and have intensified the contest and divide between capital and labour. For instance, blocking healthcare reforms and enacting generous corporation tax cuts, which effectively diverted the greatest tax burden to low-paid workers. In 2018, payroll taxes accounted for 7.8% of national income, compared to corporation taxes which made up 0.9%, the largest gap for two decades. Trump’s economic nationalism also reduced export demand for American agricultural produce and farm goods, hitting his heartland of Mid-western states the hardest (Reich, 2019). Between 2001 and 2018, 3.7 million U.S. jobs were offshored to China, 75.4% of which were manufacturing jobs (Scott & Mokhiber, 2020).
The failure of economic liberalisation which foreshadowed Trump’s rise undermined the tacit social contract which had formed the basis of the foreign policy consensus arising from America’s 1991 ‘liberal moment’. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the only major ideological challenge to liberal democracy, America became the world’s only superpower and with it came the opportunity to pursue liberal hegemony. This ‘deep engagement’ strategy advanced the neo-conservative notion which embraced free-market capitalism and also held that if foreign policy calculations were ‘without some conception of virtue there could be no social cohesion or grounds for political obligation’ (Kiely, 2020:19). The public would accept the high cost of global leadership in exchange for equitable economic growth and social mobility (Strieff, 2020).
Domestic socio-economic discontent and the social unrest which results from economic failure affects U.S. primacy on two levels. Firstly, public opinion influences the political context in which foreign policy makers can operate, limiting consent for intervention or for entering into international agreements. Across demographic lines U.S. voters currently desire more investment in infrastructure, education, scientific research, and employment, rather than foreign adventuring and demand that their elected officials focus on “our own problems” with only cost-benefit “restrained engagement” in international affairs (Halpin et al. 2019). There is little domestic consensus for American leadership, which presents an endogenous challenge for the incoming administration, constraining America’s commitments to its allies and resulting in the perception of ‘hegemonic instability’ as the U.S. displays ambiguity or indifference towards the international community, whose security it supposedly underwrites (Stokes, 2018:148). Second, the inability to redistribute wealth and protect its own citizens from hardship reveals a contradiction in the moral logic of the neoliberal system diminishing the global allure of the ‘American way of life’ and leading to scepticism about liberal democracy. The concentration of wealth and power in western elites has renewed interest in nationalistic authoritarian alternatives that in many countries have a more enduring appeal (Applebaum, 2020:56-58).
One such authoritarian alternative is China. In purchasing power terms, China has already surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largest economy and most Europeans now consider China, not the U.S. to be the world’s leading economy (Khanna, 2019:9, Fetterolf et al. 2020). China’s ascendency has eschewed many normative neoliberal maxims, creating ‘a distinctively state-directed yet marketized model that maintained key elements of social control’ (Friedberg, 2018:9). China offers an alternative political model for economic success and innovation without the need to consent to democratic reforms. Its state-capitalism approach has competed successfully with the neoliberal orthodoxy of the global hegemon and has also facilitated militaristic potency in the Indo-Pacific, an important U.S. theatre of power balancing. It has also unlocked demand for Chinese industry and finance through the trans-continental Belt and Road Initiative, widely seen as a counter-hegemonic enterprise (Fallon, 2015:140). In November 2020, China signed a trade pact with 14 Asian countries, including U.S. allies Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, in the world’s largest free trade agreement covering one third of global GDP. Arguably, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership was forged in the vacuum created by Trump’s rejection of multilateral trade agreements in the Pacific region and the damaged relationships with America’s regional democratic allies. China’s Asian neighbours as well as distant admirers are likely to be learning lessons from Beijing’s state-capitalist experiments (Khanna, 2019:158-159). Some scholars now agree that China ‘is determined to advance its system of authoritarian capitalism abroad to expand Chinese power and influence at the expense of countries that adhere to democratic principles and free-market practices’ (McMaster, 2020:103). China’s ability to reimagine liberal economic norms and selectively ignore U.S. interests, presents a clear challenge to American hegemony.
Challenge Two: The Crisis of Consent for Neoliberal Institutions
The structure of the liberal international order is maintained through an apparatus of international institutions which co-ordinate multilateral economic and security co-operation. A Realist and Gramscian critique would claim that international institutions are tacitly involved in ‘regime creation’, channelling and co-ordinating the interests of the most powerful members in a “club good” and reinforcing the hierarchical relationships between nation-states (Rosecrance & Stein, 2008:211, Babic, 2020:773). As the U.S. is the most powerful founding-member of the ‘club’, neoliberal institutions have been instrumental in entrenching normative rules which protect American interests and legitimise its power and influence in a de facto ‘American system.’ Alternatively, the rise of U.S. power since the second world war is worrisome for the international community. Institutions therefore restrain American hard power, making it safe for the world and serve to strengthen regional and global co-operation for a future ‘after unipolarity’ (Ikenberry, 2006:136). It is on both sides of this argument regarding the function of neoliberal institutions that counter-hegemonic forces unfold.
Firstly, there is a breakdown of consent from rising powers, notably China, to be tied to a system that is liberal in character and promotes American leadership. This discontent presages ‘the fragmentation of the complex and multi-layered systems of institutions, a reduction in compliance rates with existing rules, practices and norms, and a realignment of priorities to incorporate the shared concerns of rising powers […] that are questioning the advance of liberalism’ (Ikenberry & Lim, 2017:18). China’s role in the creation of new institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank and the New Development Bank forms the foundation of a counter-hegemonic rival financial order; part of a ‘Chinese globalization’ in which China reshapes its international environment by binding states to its core interests, imposing punitive measures on regional nation-states that side with the U.S. whilst enabling client states to access economic assistance (Yong Deng, 2014:128). Although in the short-term China cannot balance the hegemonic privileges of the U.S., by encouraging a regional financial regime it is deconcentrating hegemonic power, and by enabling members to bypass western-style democratic mechanisms and controls it is delegitimising the liberal order, both preconditions for a power transition (Schweller & Pu, 2011:46-47).
Second, the Trump administration’s ‘America First’ paradigm conjured a populist vision that multilateral institutions supersede and restrain sovereign governance, limiting American power and independence. Trump’s contempt for multilateralism re-cast international institutions as an arena of competition rather than an arena of co-operation, kindling a pernicious transactional, zero-sum discourse, and undermining efforts on human rights reforms, criminal justice, security umbrellas, migration, tackling COVID-19, climate change and nuclear-weapon proliferation. This crisis of consent for the legalisation of institutions and treaties in America’s political imagination has failed to weaken the agencies of global governance. Instead, Washington’s withdrawal from institutional statecraft has made it more difficult to contain China’s expanding influence at the United Nations and has ceded influence to predatory authoritarian powers (Cheng-Chia & Yang, 2020). This posturing has resulted in:
a needless and self-defeating squandering of something of great value to the United States that the U.S. has worked hard to build and maintain for 70 years [which is] reducing U.S. power and foreign policy capacity […] devaluing elements of American soft power […] effectively turning the concept of America First into ‘America Alone’ (Congressional Research Service, 2020:9).
According to Carla Norlöff, ‘U.S. hegemony requires not just dominance, but leadership’ (2020:1281). COVID-19 exposed a vacuum in global leadership. It was the first major international crisis since the Second World War in which the U.S. did not frame, organise, and lead a collective response (Wright, 2020). Instead, the international community had to contend with a self-seeking and belligerent White House, engaging in science denial, abandoning multilateralism, and stoking geopolitical rivalries – severely undermining U.S. legitimacy (Schake, 2020). The U.S. had previously been able to ‘accrue advantages through structuring world order in ways that benefit its interests while delivering enough benefits to other states to discourage them from seeking to revise the U.S.-led order’ thus enjoying the position of ‘system-maker’ and ‘privilege taker’ (Stokes, 2018:141). Unmoored from the systems and structures of global policy co-ordination, and unwilling to convene public goods, it will achieve neither, as global public goods can be pursued through non-hegemonic regimes or new alliances.
Challenge Three: The Crisis of Consent for Liberal Democracy
The lack of moralism in the politics of the Trump administration, and its contempt for traditional allies which have collectively defended liberal democracy must be viewed alongside a simultaneous rise in authoritarian regimes; ‘For the first time this century, among countries with more than one-million people, there are now fewer electoral democracies than non-democratic regimes’ (Garton Ash, 2020). Trump’s presidency provided the fulcrum for nativist activism based on the prevailing sense of economic injustice and national injury arising from the previous challenges. The U.S. public had become sceptical of their political leaders and multilateral institutions, and ‘more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system […] more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives’ (Foa & Mounk, 2016:7). However, the anti-democratic sentiments which Trumpism unleashed and endorsed throughout the world are more challenging to U.S. hegemony than the forces of economic rivalry or the building of parallel international institutions. To qualify this claim, we must examine why the future of U.S. global hegemony ultimately rests upon the promotion of democracy.
The concept of political moralism suggests that the moral should always be placed prior to the political in decision structures, and that politics is therefore the instrument of the moral (Williams, 2005:1-17). Using this definition, we can explore both the importance and practicality of this theory in providing the legitimacy for state actions, but must start with the question of what constitutes the moral?
In western societies, political morality is usually equated with a Lockean liberal philosophy, extending into a foreign policy doctrine which prioritises social justice and human rights obligations over the self-help power politics that prevail in a realist’s mental map of the world, grounded in efforts to ameliorate a Hobbesian ‘anarchy’ through the accumulation of material strength. But authoritarian regimes such as China may also lay claim to possessing a moral imperative in their actions, even if they are contrary to western basic values. If we take the view that the first moral priority of the state is to deliver order, social structure, defence, and security to its people from the aggression of opposing states and non-state belligerents in an anarchic world, then this forms a basic legitimising function. China could claim to be a non-liberal legitimate state with a moral mandate as it meets these first obligations. However, China and other authoritarian regimes rely on coercive power to prosecute their legitimising function. Its people are forced to accept the state’s power over them through the violation, or threat of violation, of their human rights. The state’s legitimacy is dependent on the suppression of free speech, on censorship, fear, state violence, persecution based on race, religion, and identity, and on hierarchical structures where social mobility is decided on the basis of party loyalty rather than talent and merit. In this instance, the problem and the solution are blurred and the axiom of might-makes-right takes precedence, proving that the moral is not placed prior to the political. As such the ‘moral’ foundation of these regimes is only self-legitimising. China has indicated that it has no impulse to spread its ideology, and that it will not use its growing economic influence in the world to alter the political practices of other societies (Mahbubani, 2020:254). As we shall see, China may be unable to disentangle its behaviours at home from its actions abroad and will therefore face confrontation over what constitutes the unacceptable exercise of its power.
In the American popular imagination, embedding morality in a liberal rather than a Hobbesian context shapes a foreign policy narrative which could be construed as centred on ‘humanitarian aspirations’ rather than ‘national interests.’ Moreover, open-ended, utopian objectives and abstract ideas like ‘promoting democracy’ can be perplexing for the public, who are jaded by the experience of America’s ‘forever wars’; thus, 43% of American voters are confused about U.S. foreign policy goals, which inhibits consent for an enlarged role in foreign affairs (Halpin et al. 2019). Compartmentalising the vigorous promotion of democracy as an ‘optional’ liberal project, one which can be set aside, neglects the fact that morality alongside material strength makes hegemony ‘tolerable to the other members of the world community’ (Carr, 1946/2016:152) and ‘performs an essential function for dominant states: to make hegemony legitimate’ and to make power seem relatively benign (Keohane, 2012:131, Brands 2021).
American legitimacy in shaping world affairs is predicated on a liberal example: ‘If freedom of equality can no longer be found in America, there is no reason for America to exist’ (Morgenthau, 1960:55). This liberal idea is expanded into a political national purpose; ‘offering its own freedom of equality as a model to be emulated […] spilling its blood and spending its treasure to make the world safe for democracy’ (ibid:180). This purpose has secured advantageous realities for America, enabling it to expand its material and cultural frontiers as a globally acceptable hegemon. As such, rather than the combined pursuit of morality and power politics presenting a foreign policy contradiction, a useful Hegelian dialectic emerges; liberal morality is not merely the disposable attribute of a benevolent hegemon, it is an indispensable precondition of political power. Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz observes; ‘what is most impressive is how often promoting democracy has actually advanced American interests’ (2000:39).
The Trump administration persistently sought to uncouple the preservation of U.S. hegemony from its post-war liberal principles. This included the open admiration of authoritarian demagogues and renouncing pledges to traditional democratic partners. But uncoupling human rights concerns from realpolitik and ignoring ideology for the sake of pragmatism not only lets dangerous autocrats off the hook, but it also emboldens them. The U.S. remains the only power with the militaristic capability to intervene anywhere in human rights abuses, which Michael Ignatieff describes as the ‘burden’ of the United States, warning that those who de-emphasize America’s responsibilities ‘have not factored-in what tyranny or chaos can do to vital American interests’ (2003). Trump has reversed decades of consistent foreign policy rhetoric from post-cold war presidents who each understood the legitimising power of morality:
Between World War II and the Trump presidency, every U.S. leader believed that Washington could best advance its interests – whether securing prosperity or constraining authoritarians – by sustaining a liberal international order from which like-minded nations could benefit […] It would be a historically abnormal superpower, whose statecraft reflected its democratic values and a more inclusive notion of national interest (Brands, 2021).
Trump’s attempts to extract the benefits of hegemony without shouldering the burden disregarded the structural underpinnings of the international order and has destabilised the foundations of U.S. hegemony. As Robert Kagan asserts, ‘the global hegemon cannot proclaim to the world that it will be guided only by its own definition of “national interest” (2004).
The external threat to American hegemony from authoritarianism goes beyond a contest of ideas to constitute a vital risk to U.S. security interests. The increasing assertiveness of China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea indicate a political pandemic; a ‘democratic recession’, which is concerning as no two democracies have ever gone to war with each other, whereas authoritarian regimes have historically posed a threat to the U.S. (Diamond, 2020:200). As authoritarian regimes now rival democracies in number, the probability of war has increased. Trump’s own national security establishment considered authoritarianism to be the main threat to U.S. national security (National Security Strategy, 2017). Consistent with historical echoes, today’s autocratic regimes are unable to remain confined to territorial boundaries. The nature of autocracy is to create a ‘permanent revolution’ holding out promises of stability whilst creating a state of permanent instability, indeed Chinese political communications frequently refer to a douzheng – ‘struggle’ (Mitter, 2020). Xi Jinping’s affirmations that China values pluralism abroad contradicts his suppression of individual freedoms at home.[1] According to analysis from Freedom House, China and Russia have actively engaged in the subversion of democratic governments, also silencing critics, jailing journalists, engaging in cyber-warfare, electoral interference, industrial espionage and spreading disinformation.[2]
Autocracies must confront pluralism; ‘if they do not pursue global rule as their ultimate goal, they are likely to lose whatever power they have seized’ (Arendt, 1951:512). Beyond sabre-rattling in East Asia, China has secured ports in Greece, Pakistan and Djibouti and its intensifying “17+1” political engagement format with Central and Eastern European nations indicates that China is extending its counter-hegemonic ambitions outward, just when COVID-19 and discontent with economic liberalism is pushing many nations towards a dangerous form of protectionism. As nations such as Poland, Turkey, Belarus, Serbia, and Hungary fall under the sway of illiberal autocratic regimes, the China-CEE engagement strategy is conceivably a ‘divide and rule’ attempt to stoke deep political divisions in Europe, hinder the consolidation of the region and undermine consent for liberal democratic reforms (Gaspers, 2018). Meanwhile, America’s ambivalence towards NATO and its Indo-Pacific allies could lead to the Finlandisation of national politics – wherein states start to accommodate the interests of a powerful authoritarian neighbour in their political thought-processes, further weakening democracy and U.S. hegemonic stability. According to H.R. McMaster: ‘Free and open societies abroad benefits our security because such societies are natural defences against hostile, aggressive, authoritarian powers […] a world that supports American interests and reflects our values makes America more secure’ (2020:438).
Conclusion: The Most Significant Challenge for President Biden?
In terms of absolute economic, monetary, military, and technological capabilities, China’s resurgence is impressive, but it is not an imminent peer-competitor to the U.S. and lacks America’s unique capability to pursue a world-shaping grand strategy (Brooks & Wohlforth, 2016:72). Purchasing Power Parity is a useful, if imperfect gauge of welfare standards between countries, but is not a measure of total economic strength. Beijing may seek authority by establishing new regional platforms, but it is disincentivised to rapidly revise the economic and financial order that has propelled China’s success. This paper has argued that framing analysis purely in terms of these material capabilities is insufficient. More importantly, China and Russia are unable to offer compelling ideological challenges to the west; ‘people like China, but they do not respect or trust it’ (Wolf, 2020). Countries including the U.S., Great Britain, Australia, Germany, India, and Japan refuse to use Huawei’s 5G technology amid concerns over surveillance (Mitter, 2020). Rather than asserting moral leadership, China’s increasingly confrontational foreign policy, and its economic bullying of critical states such as Australia, Norway, and Canada, reveal it to be a post-responsible power enjoying its economic advantages in an age of impunity. Xi Jinping’s proclamations that China is ready to ‘lead globalization’ at best invokes perceptions of self-interest and at worst raises fears over the spread of authoritarian communist behaviours – as were demonstrated in the brutal suppressions in Hong Kong or the persecution, detention, and ‘re-education’ of the Uighurs (Yong Deng, 2014:129). However, America’s own abdication of leadership and the recent disfiguration of democracy in Washington creates a moral equivalency between the U.S. and its authoritarian challengers, wherein the political is placed prior to the moral, making alternative counter-hegemonic propositions, which are anchored in material power and self-legitimising nativist politics, more acceptable and ever more possible.
Of course, there are reasonable limitations on promoting liberal democracy around the world. Unipolarity itself creates a legitimacy problem as norms and values must be ‘imposed’ on other states. This paper has not attempted to address the often-inharmonious tension between America’s declarations on spreading democracy, freedom and the highest ideals of government and its actual imperialist behaviours abroad. Stephen Walt also argues that America has gained relatively little from its campaign to remake the world, noting that ‘America was already rich and secure and that if liberal hegemony had been more of a success, turning more countries into thriving democracies, it would not have improved America’s overall position all that much’ (2018:88-90). Alternatively, Joseph Nye posits:
When wielded alone, hard power can involve higher costs than when it is combined with soft power attraction. The Roman Empire rested not only on its legions, but also on the attraction of Roman culture. The Berlin wall came down not under artillery barrage, but from hammers wielded by people who had lost faith in Communism. A nation’s soft power, rests upon its culture, values, and policies when they are seen as legitimate in the eyes of others (2020:28).
The extent to which President Biden can persuade the American public that “our own problems” includes confronting the rising influence of anti-democratic tyrannies will determine America’s hegemonic future. U.S. primacy cannot be preserved through transactional diplomacy, financial supremacy, or defensive military posturing alone. America must urgently rediscover its ‘higher purpose’ as a benign superpower if it is to preserve international leadership. This requires a resurrected liberal policy framework which delivers on its Jeffersonian promise, recovering legitimacy through the provision of domestic and global public goods, providing moral solutions to geopolitical questions, reaffirming its security guarantees, and repairing relationships with democratic allies, and most urgently providing inspirational leadership on coronavirus and climate change. The new President should not ignore the fact that we have entered a new era of great power politics and widespread protectionism. In a multi-polar world, America’s claims to global leadership may need to be more modest, but this also provides an opportunity for restraint and for pragmatic partnerships based on clear goals, as managing the ascent of China and the belligerence of Russia will involve strengthening the liberal international order – not abandoning it, as his predecessor attempted. President Biden will need to reassess the United States’ domestic industrial profile to re-shore critical industries and jobs, striking a balance between providing the world with an anchor for liberal pluralist ideals and tackling injustice and inequality at home. The U.S. may no longer be the crusading force it once was, attempting to remake the world in its own image, but it still has an exceptional role to play as the fulcrum of geopolitical stability. Above all, American primacy in world affairs needs to be constantly earned and not taken for granted.
Bibliography
Applebaum, A. (2020) Twilight of Democracy: The failure of politics and the parting of friends, London, Allen Lane, p.56-58.
Arendt, H. (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism, London, Penguin Random House, p: 512-513.
Babic, M. (2020) ‘Let’s talk about the interregnum: Gramsci and the crisis of the liberal world order’, International Affairs, Vol. 96, No. 3, May 2020, p.773.
Brands, H. (2021) ‘The last chance for American Internationalism: Confronting Trump’s illiberal legacy’ Foreign Affairs, January 20th, 2021.
Brooks, S.G. and Wohlforth, W.C. (2016) America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century, New York, Oxford University Press, pp.3-8/72.
Carr, E.H. (1946, revised 2016) The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939, London, Palgrave MacMillan, p.152.
Cheng-Chia, T. and Yang, A.H. (2020) ‘How China is remaking the UN in its own image’, The Diplomat, April 9th, 2020.
DeSilver, D. (2018) For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades, Pew Research Centre, August 7th, 2018. (Online) https://pewrsr.ch/2nkN3Tm
Diamond, L.J. (2019) Ill Winds: Saving democracy from Russian rage, Chinese ambition and American complacency, New York, Penguin, p.200.
Fallon, T. (2015) ‘The New Silk Road: Xi Jinping’s Grand Strategy for Eurasia’, American Foreign Policy Interests, 37:3, p.140-147.
Fetterolf, J., Mordecai, M. and Wike, R. (2020) U.S. Image Plummets Internationally as Most Say Country Has Handled Coronavirus Badly, Pew Research Centre, September 15th, 2020. (Online) https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/09/15/us-image-plummets-internationally-as-most-say-country-has-handled-coronavirus-badly/
Foa, R.S. and Mounk, Y. ‘The Democratic Disconnect’, Journal of Democracy, No. 27, July 2016, pp.7-17.
Friedberg, A.L. (2018) ‘Globalization and Chinese Grand Strategy’, Survival, Vol. 60, No. 1, February-March 2018. p.9.
Garton Ash, T. (2020) ‘The Future of Liberalism’, Prospect, December 9th, 2020. (Online) https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-future-of-liberalism-brexit-trump-philosophy
Gaspers, J. (2018) ‘Divide and Rule’, Berlin Policy Journal, March 2nd, 2018. (Online) https://berlinpolicyjournal.com/divide-and-rule/
Halpin, J., Katulis, B. Juul, P., Agne, K., Gerstein, J. and May, N.J. (2019) America Adrift: How the U.S. Foreign Policy Debate Misses What Voters Really Want, Center for American Progress, May 5th, 2019. (Online) https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/reports/2019/05/05/469218/america-adrift/
Ignatieff, M. (2003) ‘The American Empire: The Burden’ The New York Times Magazine, January 5th, 2003.
Ikenberry, J.G. (2005) ‘Power and liberal order: America’s post-war world order in transition’ International Relations of the Asia Pacific, Vol. 5, No. 2, p.136.
Ikenberry, J.G. & Lim, D.J. (2017) China’s emerging institutional statecraft: The Asian infrastructure investment bank and the prospects for counter-hegemony, Brookings, p.4-7.
Kagan, R. (2004) ‘A tougher war for the U.S. is one of legitimacy’, The New York Times, January 24th, 2004.
Keohane, R.O. (2012) ‘Twenty Years of Institutional Liberalism’, International Relations, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp.125-138.
Khanna, P. (2019) The Future is Asian: Global Order in the Twenty-First Century, London, Weidenfold & Nicholson, pp.9/158-159.
Kiely, R. (2005) Empire in the age of globalization: U.S. Hegemony and neoliberal disorder, London, Pluto Press, pp.88-92.
Kiely, R. (2020) The Conservative Challenge to Globalization: Anglo-American Perspectives, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Agenda, p.19.
Kissinger, H.A. (2014) World Order, London, Penguin Books, p.236.
Mahbubani, K. (2020) Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, New York, Hachette. pp:254-255, 271.
McMaster, H.R. (2020) Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, London, William Collins, p.103/438.
Morgenthau, H.J. (1960) The Purpose of American Politics, New York, Knopf, p.55/180.
Norlöff, C. (2020) ‘Is COVID-19 the end of U.S. hegemony? Public bads, leadership failures and monetary hegemony’ International Affairs, vol. 96(5) pp:1302-1303.
Mitter, R. (2020) ‘The Word China Wants: How power will-and-won’t reshape Chinese ambitions’ Foreign Affairs January/February 2021. (Online) https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-12-08/world-china-wants
Nye, J.S. Jr. (2020) Do Morals Matter? Presidents and foreign policy from FDR to Trump, New York, Oxford University Press, p.28.
Reich, R. ‘How Trump has betrayed the working class’ The Guardian, London, 22nd December 2019.
Rosecrance, R. and Stein, A.A. (2001) in Stein, A.A. ‘Neoliberal Institutionalism’ in Reus-Smit, C. and Snidal, B. (Eds). The Oxford Handbook of International Relations (2008) p.211.
Schake, K. (2020) ‘The Post-American Order: ‘America First’ will leave America behind’ Foreign Affairs, 21st October 2020. (Online) https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-10-21/post-american-order
Schweller, R.L. and Pu, X. (2011) ‘After Unipolarity: China’s visions of an international order in an era of U.S. decline,’ International Security, Summer 2011, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp.46-47.
Scott, R.E. and Mokhiber, Z. (2020) Growing China trade deficit cost 3.7 million American jobs between 2001 and 2018: Jobs lost in every U.S. state and congressional district, Economic Policy Institute, January 30th, 2020. (Online) https://files.epi.org/pdf/181374.pdf
Stokes, D. (2018) ‘Trump, American hegemony and the future of the liberal international order’ International Affairs, vol. 94(1). p.133/141.
Strieff, D. (2020) ‘America’s Post Trump Role’ The World Today, Chatham House, December 2020 & January 2021, Vol. 76, No. 6, p.23.
Walt, S.M. (2018) The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s foreign policy elite and the decline of U.S. primacy, New York, Picador, pp.88-90.
Williams, B. (2005) ‘Realism and Moralism in Political Theory’. In Hawthorn, G. (Ed.) In the beginning there was the deed: Realism and Moralism in political argument, Oxford, Princeton University Press, pp:1-17.
Wolf, M. (2020) ‘The fading light of liberal democracy’, Financial Times, 23rd December 2020.
Wolfowitz, P. (2000) ‘Remembering the Future’, National Interest, Vol. 59, pp.35-45.
Wright, T. (2020) The Point of No Return: The 2020 Election and the crisis of American foreign policy, Lowy Institute, October 2nd, 2020. (Online) https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/point-no-return-2020-election-and-crisis-american-foreign policy
Yong Deng (2014) ‘China: The Post-Responsible Power’, The Washington Quarterly, Winter 2015, Vol. 37, No .4, pp.117-132.
U.S. Role in the World: Background and Issues for Congress’, Congressional Research Service report, December 16th, 2020.
U.S. National Security Strategy, December 2017. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905-2.pdf
[1] See Xi Jinping’s speech to the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilisations, May 2019.
[2] See https://freedomhouse.org/issues/authoritarian-reach.
