The time has come for Americans to rethink their country’s role in the world and fashion an internationalism suited to today’s realities. But before imagining a successor to liberal universalism, it’s necessary to understand why it foundered.
This is the subject of Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes’s The Light That Failed (2020). Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist, and Holmes, an American law professor, make formidable guides, having studied America’s post-Cold War foreign policy from both the giving and receiving ends. The Light That Failed is analytically rigorous, clearly argued, and—at just over 200 pages—concise, a major accomplishment for a work of such scope. Though the book went to press before the pandemic, it remains an indispensable resource in our current predicament and is essential reading for anyone considering a post-Trump foreign policy. Krastev and Holmes’s postmortem on liberal universalism, however, is ultimately incomplete—for they insufficiently probe the type of liberalism that the United States tried to universalize.
As Krastev and Holmes see it, the key question to ask about America’s post–Cold War foreign policy isn’t “What went wrong?” but “What if we were wrong?” The former question presupposes that the objectives of liberal universalism were well founded, even if Washington chose the wrong means to achieve them. But the latter question—Krastev and Holmes’s question—suggests that the objectives themselves require greater scrutiny. Their argument thus takes aim at liberal universalism’s underlying theory of change: that spreading the political and economic structures of the Cold War’s victors around the globe would pave the surest path to lasting peace and prosperity.
This theory was doomed, according to Krastev and Holmes, because liberal universalism was bound to generate resentment. In explaining why, they identify two “culprits co-responsible for the strange death of what we used to call the liberal international order”: Central European populists, led by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński; and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Both culprits bristled at liberal universalism’s implicit moral hierarchy, which placed the United States and Western Europe on a pedestal while imploring other countries to imitate them. And eventually, both set out to cut their exemplars down to size.