The Price of Liberty

A guest editorial by Niall Ferguson [with comments from TPOL]

What’s odd about the last four years before Trump is that the Biden-Harris administration came in and was welcomed by liberals around the world. “The adults were back in the room.” American foreign policy was going to respect alliances again, and it all went disastrously wrong.

The allies have been sorely disappointed. [To put it mildly.] The net result of the Biden administration’s foreign policy was that an axis formed that didn’t exist in 2020, an axis that brought together Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. And unlike the axis of evil of 2002 around the Iraq War, it actually exists. It’s not just an idea for a speech. These powers cooperate together, economically and militarily.

What went wrong? The answer is a disastrous failure of deterrence that really began in Afghanistan in 2021, got a lot worse in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, and got even worse in 2023 when Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad attacked Israel.

So I think one has to understand the reelection of Donald Trump as partly a public reaction against a very unsuccessful Democratic administration, a little bit like what happened in 1980 when Americans voted for Ronald Reagan and repudiated Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis.

I don’t think Donald Trump’s reelection is a big win for China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Quite the opposite. I think it’s bad news for them. [As the attack this weekend started to point out.]

I am always reminded when people talk about the liberal international order of what Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire: It was neither holy nor Roman, nor an empire. And the same is true of the liberal international order. It was never very liberal, very international, or very orderly. It’s actually an illusion that such a thing ever existed after 1945.

There was a cold war in which two empires, an American and a Soviet, struggled for power, and the United States at no point ceased to exercise power in the classical sense.

I read so many commentators saying, “How terrible and shocking it is that the United States is reverting to empire after the wonderful time of the liberal international order.” I wrote a book 20 years ago called Colossus, making the point that the United States has been an empire for many years and didn’t stop being an empire in 1945.

The interesting thing about the Cold War was that both empires accused the other of imperialism, each claiming that it wasn’t imperial. But they both, in fact, functionally were empires.

The United States today has much in common with the empires of the past, particularly in its ability to project military and naval power all around the world. So I think we should probably be a little bit more skeptical about the concept of a liberal international order.

What’s interesting about Trump is that he’s open about it. He wants Greenland. He wants to retake the Panama Canal. And so, in a sense, we’ve gone back to the era of President William McKinley at the turn of the 20th century.

But that’s not surprising, because Trump told us in the campaign back in the summer that McKinley was his hero, and that was not just the “tariff man” McKinley, but clearly also the McKinley who acquired, after the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines with an option on Cuba. So I think we are just back in a late 19th-century mode with Donald Trump.

One of the points I made in Colossus was that the United States is not actually very good at being an empire by the standards of, say, Britain in the 19th century. There’s a structural problem with an American empire, which is worth spelling out.

There are deficits that make it hard to be an effective empire. There’s a deficit in terms of manpower. I mean, America imports people. It doesn’t really export people. Very few Americans want to spend large amounts of time in hot, poor, dangerous places. Hence, the six-month tour of duty for the military abroad.

There’s another kind of deficit, which is the fiscal deficit. America can’t afford to occupy zones across the planet the way the British or the French did.

Presently, there is also the problem that America is now spending more on debt interest payments than on the defense budget for the first time in its history. When that is the case, you’re probably in trouble. That’s been true, more or less, of every empire since 16th-century Spain. [A good sign that the clock is winding down.]

And finally, there’s an attention deficit disorder, which I think is inherent in American public and political life. People lose interest in complicated, messy foreign adventures rather quickly, and that makes it very hard to complete them, whether it’s in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. [Of course, it is not just foreign affairs that the ADD condition causes Americans to ignore: the continuing loss of liberty in our States is being ignored even more. And the connection between the two.]

All these are structural problems. The American empire is one of these strange cases of cognitive dissonance: Functionally, the United States has many of the characteristics of an empire, but Americans themselves don’t really want to be in the empire business, and this causes American power to oscillate. There are periods of strength, then there are periods of retreat. And after Trump overreaches, which he doubtless will, there’ll be another bout of retreat. We’ve seen this movie several times.

[And no doubt will see it again and again as the clock continues to tick down to midnight. Are we prepared to survive it and establish a full measure of liberty? We at TPOL pray that is so, and continue to work to that end.]