Saving What Postwar Order?

In an article in Foreign Affairs Michael J. Mazarr first articulates two “vulnerabilities” of the “postwar order”. The first vulnerability is overreach:

The first is excessive ambition: the architects of the postwar system risk pushing their objectives too far and generating a violent backlash. This is arguably what happened with NATO in Europe. Under the United States’ watch, the alliance metastasized from a measured and carefully calibrated program to fortify European security into a limitless, duty-bound imperative.

and “liberal interventionism”. The second is “hedging”, avoiding taking a stand:

hesitate to enforce the norms of the order. These countries—including Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey—participate in and support many elements of the international system. They broadly support the order’s norms and typically respect them. Some of these countries are set to become major economic and military players. Yet if more of them come to see a Chinese-Russian axis as a useful counterweight to U.S. and Western dominance and therefore defect from U.S.-led institutions, the postwar order will be in deep trouble.

I think he’s being kind or maybe it’s just wishful thinking. Is Saudi Arabia, for example, hedging or is it on the other side? He concludes:

To preserve the postwar international order, Washington will have to moderate and restrict its promotion of the order’s norms and the enforcement of its rules. A rigid and uncompromising approach will produce repeated overreach, provoke needless backlash from hedging states, and ultimately jeopardize the consensus at the order’s core. This may be the most important lesson of recent events in Europe and beyond: the United States needs to embrace a practical and sustainable, rather than inflexible and absolute, approach to the rules-based order.

Such an approach should focus on a few nonnegotiable norms: constraints on physical and cyber-aggression, collaboration on climate change, and cooperation to promote a stable global trade and financial system. It would accept the need to work with democracies and nondemocracies alike. It would actively promote free societies but do so by helping established and emerging democracies rather than forcing change on undemocratic ones. It would accept flawed but effective arms control deals rather than holding out for perfection.

At a moment when much of the world is aligned against Russian aggression, it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that Washington should dial back the intensity of its defense and promotion of the rules-based order. After all, that order has given the United States a tremendous competitive advantage and helped stabilize world politics. But the war in Ukraine has exposed the system’s brittleness. And unless the United States adopts a more pragmatic and flexible approach to maintaining it, the postwar order may collapse into a new era of conflict.

I think there’s a certain amount of wishful thinking in that statement. “Much of the world” is not “aligned against Russian aggression”. It’s basically just the G7. The rest of the world is either “hedging” to use his terminology or they’re on the other side.

However, I’m afraid he fails to “grasp the nettle” as me auld mither used to say. In the specific case of Ukraine what should the U. S. posture be? How do we avoid upsetting a rules-based order whether through excessive ambition or liberal interventionism? My own view is that for a rules-based order to persist we had to follow the rules. We stopped doing that sixty years ago. Now, faced with peers or near-peers who are eager to ignore those rules as much as we have been, a new order must be crafted under very difficult conditions.