BOOK
REVIEW Crisis of American international
thought Liberal
Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation
of the American World Order by G John
Ikenberry
Reviewed by Kaveh L Afrasiabi
This book provides a good example of why
the discipline of international relations is in a
state of crisis, woefully short of the necessary
epistemological toolkit to offer an adequate
deliberation on the rapidly changing international
order.
Rehashing the familiar arguments of
the state-centric (neo) realist perspectives on
international affairs while making a strong pitch
for the viability of an American-led global order
in the 21st century, the author is an uncritical
fan of US President Barack Obama for supposedly
correcting the egregious "unipolarist" and imperial
excesses of his immediate
predecessor by putting American squarely on the
path of multilateral diplomacy and liberal
internationalism. Needless to say, critics of the
Obama administration, who are able to go beyond
the rhetoric and detect a great deal of policy
continuity with the imperial past, may beg to
differ.
Divided into eight chapters,
the beginning chapters lay down the
theoretical
foundation, which turns out to be familiar
territory, with talk of Cold War bipolarity
gradually paving the way to a more complex
multipolar world order featuring the challenge of
"rising states" to the old status quo, but not to
worry since the author is optimistically convinced
that, bottom line, the states such as China,
Russia, and India have no alternative but to
function within the existing "liberal
international order" that is founded on the
principles of commercial liberalism, democratic
peace and liberal institutionalism.
Ikenberry's sanguine prediction stems from
his conviction that despite its flaws the existing
international order is basically fine and suffers
from a "crisis of authority" not because of the
failure but rather the success of this evolving
order that accommodates itself to rising powers (p
345).
The economic dimension is largely
missing from the narrative and the role of such
non-state actors as the multinational corporations
are hardly mentioned. Although he admits in
passing that the "American model of global
capitalism has been tarnished" as a result of the
recent global financial crisis (p 310),
unfortunately Ikenberry fails to dig deeper and
provide a viable political economy analysis that
is essential to understanding the complexities of
today's globalized context.
As a result,
the dialectic of agency/structure is missing from
the purview of a limited theoretical prism in the
book's narrative that overlooks the structural
causes of crisis in favor of lop-sided emphasis on
the role of policymakers and political leaders,
such as president George W Bush who is faulted for
his aberration of pursuing "illiberal hegemony"
now thankfully reversed by "a return to a pre-Bush
era of foreign policy of ... multilateral
commitments". (p 329).
Thus, the
inherently interventionist nature of American
power is conveniently papered over, albeit with
passing references to the American mix of
"imperial" and "liberal" approach to global
affairs; although he admits that the American
involvement in "some parts of the developing
world" such as Latin America and the Middle East
"has been crudely imperial," (p 27) there is
virtually no attempt to elaborate, and this is a
major oversight stemming from the author's liberal
pro-American bias permeating the book, thus giving
it the flavor of a rationalizing discourse rather
than a disinterested analysis.
Little
wonder, then, that there is hardly any aspect of
the book that can possibly withstand the weight of
critical scrutiny. Case in point, the author
adopts at face value the pro-democracy rhetoric of
the Bush administration - that were often put
aside in light of the close cozying with various
autocracies especially in the Middle East, nor
does he offer any insight on America's
"resource-oriented" military gambits around the
world, including Europe after World War II.
Concerning the latter, Noam Chomsky has
aptly observed, "US counter-insurgency and
subversion in Greece and Italy in the 1940s were
in part motivated by concern on the free flow of
Middle East oil to the West." [1] Indeed, the
transgression of "rule of law" by the US
superpower has been too frequent to shove under
the rugs as an aberration.
The American
"liberal Leviathan" has an irrefutable history of
bellicosity that reminds this author of Luis de
Gongora y Argote's poem: "This marine monster
whose scales are robust beeches, brought more arms
to remote shores ... than the confusion and fire
brought to the walls of Troy."
Ikenberry's
fascination with American power, his inability to
decipher the coercive and exploitative facets and
the defiance that they have endangered in various
parts of the world, altogether occlude the
possibility that his narrative can be treated as a
serious critical contribution on world affairs.
The book's related metamorphosis of the
concept of hegemony into a benign organizational
or supervisory role, devoid of references to the
nefarious core-periphery and domineering
dimensions, is consistent with the author's agenda
to polish the image of US power with the help of
ultimately meaningless distinctions between
"balance, command, and consent" as supposedly
different modes of US global action; a clue to
this vacuous distinction, the latter two can be
operative in the first mode and, indeed, this is
reflective of the theoretical paucity of this book
to over-rely on such un-innovative and shallow
conceptual ramparts that contribute little to our
understanding of the subject.
Equally
questionable is the book's assumption that the
rising states do not pose even a "potential
opposition to the existing order" and thus do not
constitute a "geopolitical bloc". (p 341).
Consequently, there is no mention of the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization and how this may evolve
over time into a formidable anti-North Atlantic
Treaty Organization alliance, given the shared
security perceptions between Russia and China,
both considered by Ikenberry as insufficiently
integrated in the liberal international order.
But, what exactly is the "international
order" and is the Westphalian state system its
"bedrock" as Ikenberry claims in this book, or is
it a trans-state phenomenon with a relatively
autonomous logic that increasingly points at a
post-Westphalian order? The various international
institutions, such as the United Nations and the
World Trade Organization are, after all,
inter-governmental organizations that promote
cooperation among sovereign states that are
increasingly interdependent in the globalized
world economy.
Another pertinent question
is: is this international order actually narrowing
or widening the gaps between the world's haves and
have-nots and if the latter is indeed the case,
doesn't it mean that the present order is ripe for
further challenges to its existing unjust
hierarchies in the future?
Such questions
simply evade the radar of the author, who
constantly contradicts himself about the post-Cold
War direction of world politics, eg, his claim
that the bipolar Cold War order "gave way to a
global system dominated by the western capitalist
states"(p 17) is contradicted by his other claim
that a US "unipolar moment" replaced the Cold War
and that "in the end, it is the US itself that
will be central in shaping the evolving character
of liberal internationalism". (p 9) Such
hyperbolic statements endanger the author's own
narrative on the (Karl Polanyi) moment of "shared
leadership" etc.
In conclusion, this is a
deeply dissatisfying book, from the vantage point
of international relations theory that is bound to
frustrate any reader who is searching for fresh
insights on international order and the changing
patterns of global governance.
Note 1. Noam Chomsky,
Hegemony or Survival (Holt & Co. 2003),
p. 162.
Liberal Leviathan: The Origins,
Crisis, and Transformation of the American World
Order by G John Ikenberry. Princeton
University Press, April 2011. ISBN-10:
9780691125589. Price US$36, 360 pages, with Index
372.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is
the author of After Khomeini: New Directions
in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For
his Wikipedia entry, click here.
He is author of Reading
In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11
(BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) and his
latest book, Looking
for rights at Harvard, is now available.
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theoretical
foundation, which turns out to be familiar
territory, with talk of Cold War bipolarity
gradually paving the way to a more complex
multipolar world order featuring the challenge of
"rising states" to the old status quo, but not to
worry since the author is optimistically convinced
that, bottom line, the states such as China,
Russia, and India have no alternative but to
function within the existing "liberal
international order" that is founded on the
principles of commercial liberalism, democratic
peace and liberal institutionalism.
