The 20th century was full of revolutions and wars that claimed tens of millions of lives. But by the end of the millennium, humanity was succeeding in building a wonderful world which would be called the liberal or rule-based international order. Then came the 21st century.
The United States—having emerged from World War II relatively unscathed—used its overwhelming national power to establish the international order as it saw fit. It promoted the ideals of the Declaration of Independence—that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—throughout the world. The United Nations was founded to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. The European Union was created, ending centuries of conflict on the continent. It was the era of Pax Americana.
The term “satyagraha”—or “truth force”—coined by Mahatma Gandhi became a mourning call for the colonial rule that had enslaved the peoples of Asia and Africa for hundreds of years. After the Pacific War, the British, the French, and the Dutch, once swept away by the Japanese Imperial Army, came back with guns to reconquer Asia but were met with armed resistance this time. Asian and African nations took back their pride and independence. The number of United Nations member states has almost quadrupled from 51 in 1945 to nearly 200 today.
The US and European nations have also changed dramatically. Dr Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement aspired to end institutional racism in America, which had persisted despite President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The tide of eliminating racism quickly spread around the globe, from Europe and Australia. Apartheid in South Africa, its last bastion, crumbled before the indomitable fighting spirit of Nelson Mandela, who later became the republic’s first black president.
The Flip Side of the Liberal International Order
In 1991, the Soviet Union—the leader of the Communist Bloc that used to dominate half of the world, advancing its extremely radical ideology—collapsed from within after 70 years of harsh oppression and dictatorship. The Cold War ended. Central and Eastern European countries fled to the west, while Ukraine, Belarus, and nations in the Caucasus and Central Asia became independent. Starting in the 1980s, Asian states began to develop rapidly. Two hundred years after the British Industrial Revolution, the wave of industrialisation finally reached a global scale, and the rise of the global south began.
The world owed it to the creation of the free trade system—the flip side of the liberal international order. Free trade has facilitated the movement of capital and technology in the form of direct investment from industrialised countries to emerging economies, which then produced goods for larger developed markets. The global economy continued to expand, and the share accounted for by the major advanced industrial democracies dropped below 50%. As late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe once predicted, the 21st century would be the era of the free and open Indo-Pacific.
The new millennium has been marked by an evolution in information technology. The dramatic proliferation of the Internet and smartphones has connected 8 billion people. If the 15th and 16th centuries, when sailing ships connected Europe and Asia, were the “Second Pangaea,” then the present day can be called the “Third Pangaea,” when cyberspace becomes a vast sea of data that engulfs the earth.
The liberal international order promised to usher the first human community where all humans could be equal regardless of the colour of their skin, their gender, religion, or political creeds. Diversity was set to become a fundamental value globally. Mankind was maturing ethically and steadily.
The Tale of Two Dictatorships
Yet, in the 21st century, the liberal international order, also known as Pax Americana, started to shake. The first reason is the hostile attitude of the former ‘great communist powers’: Russia and China. Russia was once welcomed into the G7 after the collapse of the Cold War but was ousted for the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The isolated Russia again invaded Ukraine, a neighbouring country that yearns for the west, in an effort to re-establish its sphere of influence.
China, hostile to the Soviet Union in the latter stages of the Cold War, succeeded in industrialisation as it moved closer to the west and, having joined the World Trade Organisation, achieved remarkable economic growth. However, as an emerging superpower, it has embarked on a vengeful China-centric path, unilaterally expanding its maritime sphere of influence in the East and South China Seas in a coercive way short of war, which the west calls “grey zone operations.”
Behind the scenes, China has been supporting Russia in its war against Ukraine. President Xi Jinping does not hide his ambition to annex Taiwan—an island of freedom and democracy since 1994—by force. Taiwan’s population is 23 million, which is roughly between that of Romania and Australia, while its economy is large enough to be in G20, which no ASEAN nation, except Indonesia, can match. Taiwan is today’s Berlin, the symbol of freedom in Asia. If the west loses Taiwan without a fight, like it did with Hong Kong, nobody in the global south will follow the western lead.
Both Russia and China are dictatorships at heart. Both Putin’s ambition in Ukraine and Xi Jinping’s ambition in Taiwan share the same logic: “This land used to be mine, and the people who live there are my property, so I will take them back by force.” This logic of the 19th-century jungle is unacceptable to free nations, whose governments respect the free will of the people and seek their consent for legitimacy.
America First
Another reason behind the upheaval of the international liberal order is President Trump’s America First policy. Donald Trump tried to align himself with Vladimir Putin by attempting to end the war at the expense of Ukraine. Instead, Russia launched another onslaught on Ukraine, which lost America’s backing under President Biden. In this context, a ceasefire will not be easy to achieve. Additionally, President Trump believes that the EU and European members of NATO should take care of the security on the European continent. His unilateral tariffs—imposed on both friends and foes alike—have upset not only the free trade system but also western unity.
President Trump’s America First policy has deeper structural causes behind it. First, the US accounts for only 25% of the world economy today, and it was President Obama before President Trump who said that the US could no longer be the world’s policeman. The decline in relative national power demands that the US prioritise foreign policy accordingly. The pivot from Europe to Asia is real.
Second, while the US is the sole winner in digital business, the force generated by the market economy has led to the exodus of US factories overseas and the hollowing out of traditional manufacturing industries. At the same time, the influx of legal and illegal migration has placed a burden on American society. Thus, a wave of protectionism and anti-immigrant nationalism has hit the country.
Third, the advent of smartphones has popularised US politics. Low-income people who do not read newspapers have until now been indifferent and peripheral to domestic and foreign affairs. Trump awakened them with short, inflammatory messages on social media and turned them into virulent anti-elitists: they demand jobs, higher wages, and cheap gasoline. For Trump’s supporters, the external commitments of American diplomacy are irrelevant.
How to Defend Our Greatest Achievement
Despite the challenges from outside (China and Russia) and inside (the United States), the liberal international order is one of the greatest achievements in human history. We should not return to the jungle days of the 19th century, when wars were unrestrained and colonial rule and racial discrimination were rampant. Today, as the mainstay of the US is being shaken, it is necessary for the nations of Europe and the Indo-Pacific to cooperate to protect and sustain the liberal international order.
First, we must continue to insist that the values we uphold are universal. Liberalism is the idea that each person has the freedom of conscience and, through public discourse, the freedom to express their opinions. People institute laws based on those and empower governments to enforce laws as well as bind governments by law. In the east too, the idea that power entrusted to a government is to serve the people—not vice versa—has been around since ancient times: it is not different from what, in today’s terms, we call universal values of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law.
Today’s Russia and China have no such ideals that can lead humankind. Communist dictatorship and planned economy could be useful during the first phase of industrialisation. However, as soon as people become aware of their rights and wish to participate in political processes, they turn to freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. Dictatorship can oppress people for some time, but cannot win this competition of values in the end.
Second, we must defend free trade. The free world is now suffering from the US tariffs as well as China’s massive subsidies, other market-distorting measures, and coercive diplomacy that weaponises economic interdependencies. Although the combined economies of the EU, the UK, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, ASEAN that of the US are much larger than China’s. India and ASEAN are growing rapidly and will soon surpass Japan.
Free trade is inseparable from freedom of navigation. Late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for the rule of law in the oceans at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in 2015. Naval cooperation among the free nations is essential to protect both.
Third, European nations, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan should more equitably share the defence burden that the US has been saddled with. Many US allies are advanced industrial nations on the seacoast of the Euro-Asian continent—they are the west in the broadest sense. It is necessary to end the war in Ukraine and build a defence structure that will guarantee its security in the future. The deployment of European peacekeepers to Ukraine after the ceasefire, reinforced by the US commitment, is needed to deter a renewed Russian aggression. On the Asian front, further defence efforts by the US, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and South Korea are needed to deter a Taiwan contingency. The US allies should step up and share the burden in order to sustain peace and stability in the Northwest Pacific region since there is no such organisation as NATO in Asia. Diplomatic cooperation with India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and other Indo-Pacific states, as well as with European countries, is also in demand.
Now that the risk of a Taiwan contingency is increasing, nuclear weapons have become a serious concern to many. The effectiveness of the US nuclear umbrella in Asia must be ensured. Since there currently is no nuclear weapons sharing with the US, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan should start thinking about it together with the Americans. They have a lot to learn from NATO member states about flexible but robust nuclear deterrence, clear and persuasive nuclear signalling, reassurance, and Allied commitment, including that of the US.
Fourth, the UN Security Council is in dire need of reform as Russia and China are two of its permanent members, albeit not being among the Allied powers in 1939, when Stalin conspired with Hitler to partition Poland and World War II broke out. The Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) was not initially part of World War II. President Chiang Kai-shek joined the Allies only after being invited to the Cairo Conference in 1943, and Mao Zedong contributed very little to the Allied war effort. Russia and China have undermined the authority of the UN Security Council. The only way to revitalise the United Nations is to reform and expand the Security Council by electing new permanent members, perhaps without veto power and with ten-year renewable terms.
This article was written for the Lennart Meri Conference special issue of ICDS Diplomaatia magazine. Views expressed in ICDS publications are those of the author(s).