Project Syndicate -- After the Liberal Order -- Jun 15, 2026 -- Carla Norrlöf

 Project Syndicate 

After the Liberal Order

Jun 15, 2026

Carla Norrlöf

Although the liberal international order was always hierarchical, it was defensible because it allowed for restraint, negotiation, and benefits extending beyond the inner circle. As that internal moderating project fails, all that will remain is the old hierarchy and whatever resentments it engenders.

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KIVIK, SWEDEN—The liberal international order was both more real than its cynics would admit and less liberal than its defenders claimed. Its goal was never to eliminate hierarchy, but rather to restrain it through law, institutions, bargaining, rights, and reciprocity. The current crisis should be understood as a case of hierarchy with weakening restraints.

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Whatever their shortcomings, international law and institutions have organized and softened hierarchy. The postwar order rested on American primacy, unequal bargaining, selective enforcement, and exceptions for the United States and its allies. But it also made conquest indefensible, created fora in which weaker states could advocate for their interests, tied alliances to consultation, and gave human-rights claims institutional force.

These achievements are nothing to sneeze at. They changed how those with power had to speak, bargain, and justify themselves. The old order made hierarchy more predictable, more negotiated, and sometimes more constrained. Its promise was not that material advantage would vanish, but that power would be routed through procedures, reciprocal commitments, and mutual expectations.

Trade shows how this worked. The postwar trade regime was not a neutral system. Liberalization advanced in areas where powerful states were willing to accept exposure to competition, but not where they demanded protection. Thus, agriculture and textiles, where many poorer countries had a comparative advantage, were long treated as exceptions, because richer states wanted to shield their own producers. The rules were real, but they were written to accommodate the interests of the powerful.

Security rested on a similar bargain. The US did not govern Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Britain, or Australia as colonies. It built alliances, stationed troops by agreement, offered guarantees, and accepted consultation procedures. NATO gave European states protection and influence while embedding them in a hierarchy whose ultimate guarantor was the US. American power did not disappear inside the alliance system, but it did come packaged with reassurance, procedure, and limits.

Now this bargain is coming apart. Power is becoming less restrained, less consensual, and less inclined to justify itself in liberal terms. Some of the outcomes the order once claimed to protect—including open trade and investment, human-rights protections, democracy promotion, and the security of allies and smaller states from coercion or invasion—are being reversed, if not repudiated.

The US is reassessing the old order from several directions. Economically, its position has weakened in key areas, especially goods trade and manufacturing, where China has eclipsed earlier American advantages. Strategically, the US has grown wary of openness, because interdependence can expose supply chains, critical minerals, technology platforms, data flows, and finance to geopolitical leverage. The new reliance on tariffs, sanctions, export controls, investment screening, industrial policy, and friendshoring indicates that markets are viewed less as sources of mutual gain than as instruments of national power.

Militarily, the US is finding it harder to shoulder the security burden that it once did, especially as it shifts its attention toward Asia. Its European allies can no longer take support on the old terms for granted. Together, these pressures point to a narrower margin of dominance, greater risks from openness, and a widening “Lippmann gap” (when a country’s foreign-policy commitments exceed its resources).

In other areas, however, America’s retreat is less about capacity than politics. The US is not abandoning climate cooperation, refugee protection, human rights, democracy promotion, civil-society support, and international accountability institutions because it lacks the means. It is doing so because powerful domestic forces no longer accept such liberal commitments. The current crisis therefore cannot be reduced to a symptom of American decline. The US is both less able to bear some burdens and less willing to honor some restraints.

Of course, the old order was always selective. The US defended rules when they stabilized the hierarchy that it sat atop, but resisted them when they constrained American force, border control, economic coercion, intelligence practices, or close allies. The difference now is not the hypocrisy, but the fact that hypocrisy is becoming less necessary. In the past, violations still paid tribute to the rules by pretending to respect them, which left critics with a standard to invoke. When a great power no longer feels compelled to justify exceptions in liberal terms, the rule loses force not only as a constraint but also as a tool that others can use.

International order and law still matter, but their purchase is uneven. They bear most directly on the ordinary infrastructure of global commerce and politics. States still need rules to move goods, fly planes, insure cargo, clear payments, recognize diplomats, coordinate sanctions, settle disputes, and make military action understandable to their own bureaucracies and allies. Even governments that denounce international law often rely on it for routine cooperation, and for the language through which they make claims against others.

What has weakened is international law’s ability to restrain great powers and their allies when major interests are at stake. In trade, the US has helped disable World Trade Organization enforcement by blocking appointments to the institution’s Appellate Body. In Gaza, it has continued to shield and arm Israel despite grave allegations of violations of international humanitarian law. In conflicts such as the war with Iran, the clearest legal disputes may be domestic, especially over war powers, but the broader pattern is similar.

Legal constraint remains strongest in the daily machinery of international order, and weakest when it targets military discretion, economic coercion, or allied impunity. International law has not disappeared, because it still shapes what states must justify, what others can contest, and when violations become costly.

As this shift unfolds, middle powers find themselves in a far less comfortable position. Canada, Europe, and other US-aligned countries long defended the rules-based order, which placed them on a privileged tier within the US-led hierarchy. They were subordinate but protected and dependent but consulted. When the US treats tariffs, security guarantees, sovereignty claims, or alliance obligations more transactionally, these states experience the same hierarchy, but without the liberal cushioning. That makes their recent alarm understandable, but also revealing. They are not discovering hierarchy. They are discovering what hierarchy feels like for everyone else.

Looking ahead, restoring the liberal international order cannot stop at restoring comfort for Canada or Europe. The order was always tiered, but its legitimacy depended on benefits that reached beyond the inner circle, including limits on conquest, predictable economic rules, institutional voice, development pathways, and a language of rights that weaker actors could use. If allies are pushed toward the margins and outsiders lose even those diffuse advantages, the reality of an international hierarchy will become less tolerable. When law becomes optional, alliances become transactional, markets become weapons, and rights become selective, what remains is a hierarchy with fewer restraints—and fewer reasons for others to accept it.

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Carla Norrlöf

Writing for PS since 2020

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Carla Norrlöf is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto.

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