The Postwar Consensus

Exposing the Liberal International Order

Since the triumph of Donald Trump and the shake-up of the GOP and the conservative movement in America, the New Right has begun to express old complaints in new and creative ways. One of these is the idea of the “Postwar Consensus” (PWC) that emerged among liberal elites (represented by the “Boomers” in popular slang) after World War I and II. The PWC includes both foreign and domestic policies centered around America and the Western powers. (Foreign and domestic policy rise and fall together: in the case of the PWC, foreign policy is the driving force that determines domestic policy.)

In recent months on Elon Musk’s X.com, Joel Berry asked what the right means by a “postwar liberal arrangement.” Earlier this week, Brian Sauvé crowd-sourced on the same question, and has since posted an excellent summary of the responses he received. One of the best explanations of the PWC is the first chapter in R. R. Reno’s 2019 Return of the Strong Gods, where Reno analyzes the PWC through the thought and writings of Karl Popper and his mid-twentieth-century book The Open Society and Its Enemies.

The following assessment is meant to be an answer to the question, What is the Postwar Consensus? and a supplement to the good insights others have already provided. 

The Creation of the Liberal International Order

The Postwar Consensus refers the world order that emerged after the World Wars. Its overarching goal is to achieve and maintain world peace through disarmament and intrastate cooperation. This, in turn, will make it possible to achieve the kind of international prosperity and progress previous generations could only dream of. To do this requires overcoming the natural boundaries and antagonisms between states which gave rise to a multipolar world in which great national powers clash in a quest for dominance. Through international political cooperation and diplomacy, and the commercial interdependence of nations’ economies, a unipolar world can be built where a single world government manages international affairs.

The major stumbling block to seeing this vision accomplished was the natural partiality and love that men feel for their own people, way of life, and nation, and man’s ambition to be great among his people, to distinguish himself in noble acts, and to win the praise of his friends. The “strong gods” of love of one’s own, tribalism and sectarianism, loyalty to God and religious tradition, and the pursuit of truth had to be overcome. While this may seem silly, the natural affection and devotion a man feels for his own—his wife and children, his parents and kin, and his neighbors and fellow-citizens—was the central obstacle that Socrates sought to prevail over in his best regime in Plato’s Republic. It is part of man’s very nature, and for those seeking to unify mankind, it is a common problem that must be dealt with.

The effort at global unification began in earnest during WWI. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was a major architect of what became the League of Nations, created during the Paris Peace Conference (1919-1920) that settled war terms. In his January 1918 “Fourteen Points” speech to Congress setting out his vision of “the program of the world’s peace,” Wilson spoke of “open covenants of peace,” of transparent international diplomacy, of the “removal … of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade,” and the reduction of national armaments “to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.” Even though Wilson pushed hard for the United States to lead the League of Nations, he failed. Congress refused to ratify the League and allow America entrance. The League was created anyway but failed in its goals.

We get a glimpse of the hopelessly utopian and naïve vision of advocates for world peace in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact. That treaty had its origins in French foreign minister Aristide Briand, who, being afraid of future German aggression, sought to rope the United States into Europe’s security system. Working with U.S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg, the two drew up a treaty that flatly outlawed war “as an instrument of national policy” (the treaty was officially named General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy). It was initially signed by fifteen nations, but within months, sixty-two joined. The Pact, however, provided no mechanism to deal with countries that were bent on war, or how the Treaty’s participants should respond if attacked. A mere eleven years later, Hitler invaded Poland and the hope of banishing war by paper parchments lay in tatters.

Throughout World War II, the groundwork was laid for world unification after the war ended. Winston Church and President Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter in August 1941 (while the U.S. was still officially neutral), a joint statement of their commitment to “certain common principles” on which to base their hopes “for a better future for the world.” These principles included prohibitions on territorial aggrandizement, a right for countries to live in freedom from fear and want, and the “abandonment of the use of force.” At the third Moscow Conference in October 1943, the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China signed a joint declaration pledging to “recognize the necessity of establishing at the earliest practicable date a central international organization, based on the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states … for the maintenance of international peace and security.”

That international organization came to fruition in the establishment of the United Nations. The genesis for the UN was President Roosevelt, who saw himself completing the work of Wilson and the League of Nations. In March 1943, Roosevelt revealed his UN plans to his staff: it included a General Assembly, Security Council, and the centrality of the Big Four (U.S., Britain, Soviets, China) who would jointly police the world. Chartered in early 1945 and presented at the UN Conference on International Organization in San Francisco in April of that year, the United Nations was quickly signed by the fifty countries that attended the event. The preamble of the UN charter declared its intent to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” to “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights” and the “dignity and worth of the human person,” to enforce international law, and to “promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” To make good on these values, the charter promised to “employ international machinery” to accomplish its goals.

The subsequent history of European, Western, and international supranationalism and unification is too complex to trace here. The U.S. was in the driver’s seat: emerging from World War II as a dominant military superpower, it controlled over 50% of the world’s GDP. Through the Marshall Plan (1947), it provided conditional aid ($13 billion) to rebuild Europe according to world unification goals. Out of this came the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, and the Council of Europe, which eventually evolved into the European Union by 1993. On the military side, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in April 1949 between the United States, the Western Union (France, U.K., Benelux countries), Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. Currently, it boasts thirty-two members and more to be added. Today, the number of international organizations is huge, many with overlapping functions, responsibilities, and memberships.

The goals remain the same: to beat back the conflict-ridden “jungle” of a multipolar world where world war once again becomes possible, to ensure perpetual peace, to police rogue nations and protect human rights, and to enforce international law. The collection of these organizations, their purposes, ideology, and the means they employ is known as the Liberal International Order (LIO). This order—its principles, values, language, and ends—constitute the Postwar Consensus. To understand just how extraordinary and ambitious the LIO and PWC is, we must turn the clock back and see how international relations used to work. 

The Law of Nations vs. The Rules-Based International Order

The older approach to international relations was great power politics in an international state of nature morally guided by the Law of Nations. The Law of Nations is simply the natural law applied to nations: “the law of nations is the science which teaches the rights subsisting between nations or states, and the obligations correspondent to those rights.” The eminent eighteenth-century Swiss natural right jurist, Emer de Vattel, continues, explaining that

As men are subject to the laws of nature … the entire nation, whose common will is but the result of the united wills of the citizens, remains subject to the laws of nature, and is bound to respect them in all her proceedings. And since right arises from obligation … the nation possesses also the same rights which nature has conferred upon men in order to enable them to perform their duties. … Consequently the law of nations is originally no other than the law of nature applied to nations.

To make this sensible, a nation must be conceived and treated as a single entity, a “moral person.” Again, Vattel explains that “nations or states are bodies politic, societies of men united together for the purpose of promoting their mutual safety and advantage by the joint efforts of their combined strength. Such a society has her affairs and her interests; she deliberates and takes resolutions in common; thus becoming a moral person, who possesses an understanding and will peculiar to herself, and is susceptible of obligations and rights.”

The idea of a nation as more than just the aggregation of individual wills and interests—but instead as attaining a kind of mystical ontological status of its own—has an ancient pedigree (it goes back, at least, to Plato). That discussion need not detain us here; instead, what is important is that international law under the Law of Nations treats nations as persons with rights and duties.

Additionally, the various nations are in a state of nature to each other. The state of nature is a variegated and complex aspect of early modern political theory, but the basic idea is that a state of nature between men or nations exists where a common civil government over them is absent. Men, of course, can “exit” the state of nature by ceding their sovereignty to a civil magistrate and becoming a citizen of a polity. However, since nations are the result of men’s wills and actions, a nation’s sovereignty is not natural to it, but a grant of power to be used for the good of all in a particular polity. Thus, it is inappropriate and illegal for a nation to cede its sovereignty to another, greater and international, political power. The result is that the highest point of political sovereignty ends with the nation-state, for there can be no global sovereign without the dissolution of nations and the acquiescence of the world’s population as individuals to live as global citizens under a single, world polity.

The Law of Nations, like the law of nature, is not self-executing. And since there is no common governor over all nations to see that its duties and rights are followed, it falls to individual nations to enforce the Law of Nature. John Locke called this power the “executive power of the law of nature” (Second Treatise, §13), and even though Locke applied it to individuals in a state of nature, it likewise can be applied to nations in international law. As Vattel explains,

The laws of natural society are of such importance to the safety of all states, that, if the custom once prevailed to trampling them under foot, no nation could flatter herself with the hope of preserving her national existence, and enjoying domestic tranquility, however attentive to pursue every measure dictated by the most consummate prudence, justice, and moderation. … All nations have therefore a right to resort to forcible means for the purpose of repressing any one particular nation who openly violates the laws of the society which nature has established between them, or who directly attacks the welfare and safety of that society.

The executive power of the Law of Nations almost assures that there will be war between nations. Yet to bring war and perpetual international conflict to an end was the very raison d’état of the Liberal International Order. The older understanding of international relations necessitated a multipolar world, rift with potential conflict between great powers, under the moral Law of Nations that required self-enforcement and the punishment of national transgressors in a state of nature, and without any prevailing political authority overseeing or arbitering the global stage. It should be clear by now that for those bent on creating an international world order, this system had to be discredited and destroyed. The key to achieving this was to weaken and dissolve nations, which, in turn, required attacking natural loves and loyalties.

However, there is more we can learn from the Law of Nations. In a recent speech to the Australian media, Tucker Carlson lambasted Western leaders for failing to care for their own people, saying, 

“the purpose of running a government is to take care of the people who are citizens of that country. There is no other purpose. It’s not to save the world, or change the global climate, or whatever. And it’s certainly not to spend a huge percentage of your budget on refugee resettlements. It’s to take care of the people who are born there: that’s your job.” 

Carlson’s indignant lament is more than appropriate, for he is surely right. Yet the attitudes, dispositions, and governing behavior of Western leaders that he excoriates is all but demanded by the LIO. The liberal world order requires that national sovereignty be ceded to the dictates of international organizations. As such, to be a loyal member of the LIO in good standing, political elites must betray their responsibility and office as trustees of the people who elected them. They are no longer accountable to their own people, but are clients to global patrons.

Tucker longs for Vattel’s world. Vattel made it clear that a nation’s responsibility is first to itself, and only secondarily and under strict conditions for others. “The first general law that we discover in the very object of the society of nations, is that each individual nation is bound to contribute every thing in her power to the happiness and perfection of all the others. But the duties that we owe to ourselves being unquestionably paramount to those we owe to others—a nation owes herself in the first instance, and in preference to all other nations, to do every thing she can to promote her own happiness and perfection. (I say everything she can, not only in a physical but in a moral sense).” If an individual were to only selfishly care about themselves and ignore their duty toward others, this would be contemptible. The reason, however, this is not the case with a nation, is that even though the nation is, in a sense, a “moral person,” it is not an actual person. It is a union of persons in a structured hierarchy, each with unique roles and responsibilities. The responsibility of civil magistrates is to rule for the good of the people collectively. Thus, social duty requires that he tend first to his own people, their security and happiness. Only once that is done can the leaders of a nation tend to the well-being of other nations.

Vattel goes even further: 

“A nation is mistress of her own actions so long as they do not affect the proper and perfect rights of any other nation,—so long as such is only internally bound, and does not lie under any external and perfect obligation. If she makes an ill use of her liberty, she is guilty of a breach of duty; but other nations are bound to acquiesce in her conduct, since they have no right to dictate to her.” 

In other words, if China is misusing its liberty to abuse its civilians, this is wrong, but other nations have no right to intervene—no matter how much they decry the inhumanity, human rights abuses, or oppression by Chinese officials. Only if China acts aggressive against the sovereignty and rights of other nations, can other nations then intervene and exercise their executive power to enforce the Law of Nations. This way of thinking and acting internationally is anathema to the LIO. The humanitarian pathos felt by world leaders after WWII and the drive to nip any national or ethnic conflict in the bud required that world leaders begin to meddle and involve themselves in the crimes and abuses of other nations. This “activist bias” essentially makes any human rights violation a problem for the world to resolve, and saddles global leaders and leading LIO nations with the burden of liberating the oppressed and bringing tyrants to justice at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.  

The Law of Nations was replaced by a “rules-based international order” that looks to the Geneva Conventions (on just military conduct), U.N. related documents (its charter, Declaration of Human Rights, Security Council and General Assembly Resolutions), and international treaties (e.g., Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty) as the moral and political guidelines for state conduct. Not all these things are bad, of course, but there are glaring problems. Many of these “rules” are purely conventional and have no moral authority outside the will of global elites who crafted and imposed them on everyone else. They often reflect progressive and utopian visions of a world without war or injustice, or advance unreasonable notions of rights, standards of living, and conduct in war. Finally, they cannot truly be enforced; obedience to international “rules” is a façade that some nations can and often do ignore (including the United States). In the end, the rules-based international order, just like the Law of Nations, requires voluntary self-enforcement by distinct nations.

The Global Market as the Engine of the Liberal International Order

Rejecting multipolar Westphalian sovereignty, great power politics, and the Law of Nations while talking up a new liberal international order of global cooperation and peace is one thing. Finding ways to implement, pursue and achieve its ends, and successfully maintain the LIO was, however, another matter. The Liberal International Order is not a political system; politics proper had to be banished and something else substituted in its place. The political art involves two ends: first, and most basically, a distinction between friends and enemies, and thus the willingness to fight to preserve oneself and one’s way of life; second, and ultimately, the realization of the good life—a life of virtue and genuine happiness in concord with like minded friends. These ancient political purposes were implacably opposed by the LIO. The first was unthinkable because it created conflict and war; the second, because it presupposed the strong loves and attachments to family and nation, virtue and honor, and religion and God that had (supposedly) led to the World Wars.

Mass commercial production, material wealth, and the global market would replace politics. If national citizens could be reduced to mere consumers, they could be placated and formed into interchangeable economic units. If people’s material needs could be satisfied on a mass scale, and if they could be endlessly entertained with food, work, Hollywood, iPhones, and TikTok then their political agency, national distinctions, and natural drive for ambition could be repressed; or, failing that, at least channeled toward global economic, rather than political, ends. Global commerce is a cosmopolitan and urban phenomenon, and thus it is not surprising that more and more of the world’s population lives in cities. This is preferable for the LIO, since middle-class citizens who own productive land outside urban centers are more likely to be fiercely independent—economically and politically. The LIO envisions a different future: in the words of Danish politician Ida Auken (later summarized by the WEF), “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”

The original allegiance-for-protection exchange between citizens and civil magistrates was transformed into a slick door salesman pitch: “we’ll take care of all your needs and wants if you let us rule you unconditionally.” Such a deal would signal the death knell of republican government, elections, consent of the governed, and national sovereignty. It meant that the LIO could go about its work without having to worry about popular consent or the will of the people. Thus, using material wealth, global trade, automated and formalized manufacturing, a global currency of exchange (the U.S. dollar), and uniform products and materials (e.g., plastic), the LIO was able to create a global society oriented around a common commercial life.

Since actualizing a global political system that assumed common ground between peoples and tried to rule the world as a single entity is impossible, LIO elites turn to a corporate model to implement their ideals. On this paradigm, self-appointed leaders run the world as a publicly-traded corporation, with “global citizens” playing the role of stockholders who have theoretically invested in the “global community” (both vacuous euphemisms) but who have no power, no involvement in management, no decision over how things are run, and have thus spun the political roulette on whether or not their investment will return a “profit.” This system also encouraged, if not mandated, mass, global migration. What did it matter if one’s historic country of origin was overrun with Muslim, Indian, or Mexican immigrants if they were, first and foremost, busy worker bees and consumers? What could be a better tool to destabilize traditional national loyalties and demoralize a people devoted to their particular ways of life (language, religion, laws, customs, norms, etc.)?

Finally, the corporate model meant that the traditional reliance upon treaties between sovereign nations was disbanded. Instead, the world would be managed by a superpower hegemon like the United States with help from LIO organizations. Economic partnerships, non-aggression pacts, demilitarized and no-fly zone, informal alliances, closed-door deals, and if necessary, a few drone or airstrikes to put would-be dictators in their place were the tools world leaders had at their disposal. Even more traditional treaties like NATO no longer function as treaties; they are perpetual elite clubs for control, profit, and military gains without any of the traditional risks or costs. With these tools and models, the LIO gambled that world security could forever be ensured. As such, the good life was not only redefined but assured through social scientific progress toward every-broadening human development and material happiness.

The CIA, the Intel-Security State, and the Foreign Policy “Blob”

An essential element of the functionality of the LIO are the intel agencies and security apparatus that make its gears turn. At the center of the U.S. intel agencies is the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was created by the National Security Act in 1947. The CIA was originally a strictly intelligence-gathering agency, something it did well. The National Security Act wanted the CIA to “coordinate the intelligence activities of the several Government departments and agencies in the interest of national security,” and to this end empowered it to “correlate and evaluate intelligence relating to the national security, and provide for the appropriate dissemination of such intelligence within the Government.” A final proviso in the Act granted the CIA power to “perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.” Nothing in the Act granted the agency power to become a covert, overseas operator.

In his 2007 book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, Tim Weiner explains how the agency lost it way. Using that final proviso as a loophole, the CIA under Truman, and then every president since, began to engage in international clandestine espionage. This was viewed as necessary at the time, given the communist and Soviet threat. Yet even after the fall of the USSR, Presidents Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump continued to use the CIA to spy on other countries, steal their secrets and technology, topple unwanted dictators and foment color revolutions, and assassinate high-ranking but troublesome officials. This was carried out against friend and foe alike. The result of the out-of-control agency was a high cost in human lives and national treasure, if not the United States’ reputation and good will with her allies.

The CIA is just one example of many of the bureaucratic agencies that form the intelligence and foreign policy arm of America’s dominance and bid for control over the international order. There are, however, many more agencies, contractors, NGOs, think tanks, interest and lobby groups, media organizations, academic institutions, individuals, and the U.S. military itself that constitute the “foreign policy community” in Washington, D.C.—or what Stephen M. Walt calls “the blob.” In his book, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy, Walt walks the reader through how the foreign policy security state sells their ideology and importance by rigging the marketplace of ideas. Through disinformation and manipulation, bias, control of media talking points, and presenting narrow, self-interests as national interests, the blob is able to strong-arm the American people and Washington officials.

First, foreign threats are inflated to the highest, existential level. Immediate action is counseled, enemy capabilities are exaggerated, and the threat is presented as being unreasonable and beyond diplomacy. America’s allies are represented as being weak and indecisive, requiring benevolent but firm and unilateral American intervention. Second, the benefits of security, prosperity, and the safeguarding of American values are wildly exaggerated. Third, the true costs of intervention are concealed, while the long term costs of inaction are inflated. The foreign policy blob works overtime to manage casualty counts to keep them within acceptable ranges, while often ignoring or covering up the deaths and destruction inflicted on other peoples and lands.

Peter Van Buren saw the foreign policy security state’s work in real time. Having served with the Foreign Service for over twenty-three years, he volunteered to go to Iraq as part of an Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team (ePRT). In his book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Van Buren recounts the way billions of dollars were wantonly tossed around, lost, wasted, and spent on corrupt endeavors. “A soldier recalled unloading pallets of new US hundred-dollar bills, millions of dollars flushing out of the belly of a C-130 cargo aircraft to be picked up off the runway by forklifts… You couldn’t walk around a corner without stumbling over bales of money… At one point we were tasked to give out “microgrants,” $5,000 in actual cash handed to an Iraqi to ‘open a business,’ no strings attached. If he took the money and in front of us spent it on dope and pinball, it was no matter.”

The truth is that the interventionism required to be the hegemon of the LIO is a massively lucrative business. Big military and contractor money drive America’s reckless foreign policy, and many Washington officials get rich in the process. The “blob” takes care of its own: when there’s a change of administration, or someone steps down, they are simply recycled into another position—often one more financially padded than the one they left. These are career bureaucrats who are never held accountable for their imprudence and corruption, and who benefit from the continuation of American dominance in a unipolar LIO. What’s left forgotten and maltreated is the American citizen who has no power or ability to reign in America’s foreign policy or hold those responsible accountable, even though they are being defrauded by U.S. global dominance.

The End of Nationalism—Almost

The blame for the destruction of the World Wars was placed at the feet of nationalistic fervor and loyalty. The strong love that people feel for their own family, kin, and people, stirred to ambition and greatness by natural leaders among them (i.e., demagogues), must be tamped down and deconstructed. From hence forth, nationalism would be tied to fascism, Nazism, and populist authoritarianism. The only reasonable option open to a freedom-loving people was a politically and economically open global society led by the LIO.

This analysis and prescription was universal, with one exception: Israel. The effort to establish a state of Israel in Palestine far predated the World Wars. However, both wars played an intimate role in bringing about an Israeli state. After Britain entered the First World War in 1914, Zionists began to influence British policy against the Ottoman Empire, which culminated in the November 1917 Balfour Declaration that announced support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Fulfillment of this vision, of course, would have to wait until after WWII. The holocaust and ethnic cleansing by the Nazis, combined with the expiration of the British Mandate over Palestine in 1948 (originally set up by the League of Nations after WWI), resulted in David Ben-Gurion of the Jewish People’s Council declaring the establishment of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948. Within twenty-four hours, the United States recognized Israel. (The previous year, the United Nations had passed a resolution to partition Palestine and approve the creation of an Israeli state).

The emergence of the United States after WWII as the military and economic leader of the West and the nascent organizations of a new liberal world order, the existence of this order as eternal opposition to nationalism, fascism, and authoritarian regimes, and the creation of Israel as a safeguard against Jewish genocide and triumph over the Nazis—all this meant that the fate of Israel was directly tied to the LIO, and more specifically to the United States as world leader. Israel was a special case: she was to be protected and aided by the Western powers and the LIO, yet she was also regulated by them. Israel was sovereign, but conditionally, according to the approval of the LIO’s organizations. The historic approach of treaty-making between two sovereign nations on mutually acceptable terms was gone. In the seventy-six years since the Israeli state was established, the U.S. has not had an official treaty with her, even though the U.S. has poured billions of dollars and endless military support—let alone political backing—into her survival and prosperity. Instead, Israel is a perpetual “partner” and has a “special relationship” with the United States. This approach exemplifies how the U.S., as world hegemon, unilaterally runs and oversees world events and interstate relations the way a CEO runs a corporation.

The United States’ special relationship with Israel has completely altered the way American foreign policy is done. In their 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (an expansion on their 2006 article in the London Review of Books), John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt dispassionately and accurately explain the existence and influence of special interest groups who strongly advocate for Israeli support. Mearsheimer and Walt are clear that they are not addressing Jews or Judaism, but those (Jews, Christians, secularists) who support the modern state of Israel. The Israel Lobby—which is composed of eclectic mix of individuals, organizations (e.g., the Zionist Organization of America, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), special interest groups, and more—has tremendous influence in Congress and the White House: it provides continuous profits for the military weapons industry, it can kill legislative packages it doesn’t like, it manipulates representatives and diplomats alike, and it has wielded the accusation of anti-Semitism as an effective weapon to silence criticism of Israel or U.S. policy towards her. The result is that the U.S. has given an inordinate amount of military, financial, and political support to Israel even when it was arguably not in America’s national interest. In a sense, Israel has become a U.S. protectorate; it is a colony or outpost of the U.S.-led Liberal International Order in the Middle East.

Among American citizens and citizens of other nations, the outsized role of the purity and unwavering goodness of Israeli nationalism has produced an unhealthy psychological pathology. After the horrific October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel, Glenn Beck proclaimed that “to have the privilege to stand with the Jew is a tremendous honor spiritually” and he wrote a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to ask for Israel citizenship. More recently, British conservative critic Douglas Murray appeared on the Ben Shapiro Show to aver that Israel is the core of Western civilization: “Western civilization could not survive the destruction of the Jewish state, because it would be, among much else, the cutting away of the whole tree we’re on. And Western civilization would die.” Not just the West, but even America could not live without the Jewish people: “Could America survive if the Jewish people were no more on its watch, or everybody was forcibly deported from the Holy Land? Come on. Of course not.”

Never mind the fact that Murray has conflated the ancient Hebrews with modern Judaism and the twentieth-century state of Israel. His and Beck’s disposition toward Israel and the fate of the Jewish people perfectly encapsulates (in individual psyches) the logic, disposition, and affections of the Liberal International Order. American and British nationalism are bad, racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic. Instead, we must become citizens of the world, part of a global community, and defer all political and military decision to international organizations. 

Yet the love of one’s own and attachment to one’s people, history, customs, and national life cannot be entirely squashed; it needs an outlet. That outlet is the affection foreigners show toward the Israeli state and the destiny of the Jewish people. Their prosperity, freedom, and destiny are our prosperity, freedom, and destiny. We see this in the twentieth-century invention of a “Judeo-Christian” vocabulary and conceptuality, meant to tie the fate of America to Judaism, erase America’s uniquely Protestant history and founding, and to unite America’s fractious religious sects against any common enemy (such as godless communism). Israeli nationalism represents the antithesis of European (and by extension, American) nationalism that sought to destroy the Jews. Under the LIO, Israel alone is allowed to have an ethno-nationalist state, and all other peoples must repress their own nationalist feelings and channel them toward unwavering and obsequious support for Israel. Only in this way can one truly prove that they are not an anti-Semite or neo-Nazi. This serves the dual purpose of tamping down nationalist fervor—a great threat to the viability of the LIO—while also providing continuous validity to the LIO and its intimate and necessary relationship to Israel from the beginning.

America’s legitimacy as world leader and enforcer of the LIO is directly tied to the moral cause and success of the state of Israel. American citizens, therefore, must be Zionists and must pledge undying support for Israel, come what may. Without Israel’s nationalism, her determination to survive despite being surrounded by hostile forces, and her heroic history for Americans to glorify, there would only be an empty and blasé bourgeois love for humanity—which everyone knows is empty and meaningless. In Israel’s absence, a home-grown desire for national identity and greatness might arise, and so the LIO must ensure that Israel’s plight and national struggle be constantly before the public’s eye, while nationalist movements at home are demonized and crushed. 

Of course, there are often strategic and political reasons, foreign and domestic, to support Israel, even in the current conflict, as Nate Fischer and Scott Yenor have pointed out. What is being described above, however, is the double standard approach to nationalism produced—indeed, required—by the LIO, and the sub-rational mode of LIO foreign policy. New Right skeptics of American foreign policy frequently highlight this exceptionalism, so to speak. Other nations are allowed to keep their particular cultures as long as they submit to LIO dominance, but any LIO hegemon, like America, must be exceptionally cosmopolitan. Exchange that internationalist cosmopolitanism for a realist, nationalist approach and charges of bigotry, racism, and anti-Semitism will soon follow.  

Moral Legitimacy for the Liberal International Order

The Postwar Consensus that actively supports the Liberal International Order requires significant moral authority to justify its history and continued operation. It has transformed the world in the twentieth-century. Such power and its life-altering effects must be made legitimate, either in real-time or through post-hoc rationalizations. Among the various justifications provided, three have been continuous and prominent: the protection of human dignity and rights, the division of the world into good versus evil actors, and the global spread of democracy.

Human Dignity and Human Rights

The United Nations was chartered in June 1945. While the charter declared the member’s “faith in fundamental human rights,” the full Declaration of Human Rights was not adopted until 1948. That document, drafted by a UN committee led by Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of FDR, solemnly declared its recognition and respect for the “inherent dignity” of “all the members of the human family” who share “equal and inalienable rights.” Human dignity and human rights were said to be “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”

Echoing FDR’s 1941 State of the Union “Four Freedoms” address, the Declaration spoke of “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want.” The Declaration promised to promote “social progress and better standards of life,” as well as “universal respect for and observation of human rights.” While many of those rights were familiar to the American political tradition, many of them were not. Beginning with Article 22, the Declaration lists “rights” particular to twentieth-century social policies: the right to social security, to equal pay, to rest and leisure, to a standard of living to cover basic needs, to free (yet compulsory) elementary education, and the “economic, social and cultural rights indispensable” for man’s dignity and the “free development of his personality.” Critically, the Declaration also assures the world that “everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.” The expansive rights of the Declaration and the general promise to free mankind the world over from want and fear—and that these were necessary, universal, and irreducible moral obligations demanded by the nature of man and human conscience—became the driving moral force of the LIO.

Almost every U.S. President since the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights has made generic (and undefined) human dignity and expansive rights the moral center of their foreign (and domestic) policy. In his January 1949 inaugural address, Harry S. Truman spoke of “a major turning point in the long history of the human race” after the first half of the twentieth-century had been stained by “unprecedented and brutal attacks on the rights of man.” Having defeated fascism twice, the great struggle of Truman’s time was that between communism and democracy: the “differences between communism and democracy do not concern the United States alone. People everywhere are coming to realize that what is involved is material well-being, human dignity, and the right to believe in and worship God.” President Jimmy Carter in his June 1977 commencement address at the University of Notre Dame entitled, “Human Rights and Foreign Policy,” declared that “we have reaffirmed America’s commitment to human rights as a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy.” For Carter, America, though imperfect, was the gold standard. “No other country is as well-qualified as we to set an example” concerning human freedom and rights.

President Obama, in his 2009 speech at Cairo University in Egypt (“A New Beginning”), sought to force common ground between the Western and Islamic nations by asserting that “America and Islam are not exclusive,” but instead, “they overlap, and share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.” Later that year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put forward a “Human Rights Agenda for the 21st Century.” Clinton’s liberal international humanitarianism was on full display: all people must be free from the “oppression of tyranny, from torture, from discrimination,” as well as from “the oppression of want—want of food, want of health, want of education, and want of equality in law and fact.” In other words, all must be flattened and made equal. For Clinton, “democracy” and “development” rise and fall together: “this Administration … will promote, support, and defend democracy” and “at the same time, human development must also be part of our human rights agenda.”

The language of human rights and the expansive rights enumerated by the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights meant that rights were never-ending: there were no natural or divine boundaries and certainly there were no concomitant or pre-existing social duties; new rights could be added at the behest of enlightened global leaders as social and international progress opened our minds to these rights (re: sexual rights) and made their attainment possible. Human dignity, on the hand, was just as malleable, invoked for any reason and used to justify every Western state action, yet never being properly defined in relationship to God’s creation and man’s final, heavenly end. Liberal “dignity” was an atheological replacement for Christian theology and anthropology, while “human rights” displaced natural and divine rights instituted and defined by God. Henceforth, mankind was in charge of his own fate, and he would remake the world.

Blood Guilt, Good vs. Evil, and Absolute Enmity

The end of the First World War saw the Allied nations extract blood guilt upon Germany and her allies. The Treaty of Versailles was a national embarrassment for the German people and her leaders, and historians never tire of pointing to the humiliation at Versailles as a major impetus for the rise of the National Socialist Party and the Third Reich over the next two decades. Germany was stripped of its historic territory, new nations were created overnight, entire populations displaced and placed under foreign control, massive financial reparations were demanded (the entire cost of the war), and strict limitations imposed on Germany’s future industrial and military production. To pressure the Germans to sign the Treaty within the six weeks allotted timeframe, the U.S. and Royal Navy set up a blockade of German ports which resulted in 700,000 German casualties over six months (which extended well after the armistice had been signed).

The Versailles Treaty itself contained a clause demanding that Germany and her allies acquiesce in admitting plenary responsibility for starting the war and all the death and destruction it caused (Part VIII: Reparation; Section 1; Article 231): “The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies” (pp. 137-38). Needless to say, this was a wildly inaccurate and unjust assessment of the origin of the war and who was to blame for so much death and suffering.

In such an unprecedentedly deadly and gruesome global conflict, the tendency by the winners to recast the war as a stark, binary struggle between the forces of evil and the forces of good was as irresistible as it was irresponsible and inaccurate. It was irresistible because humans cannot help but search for meaning in history—why did this happen? Did it have to happen this way? Did God want this outcome? Was He even involved at all? Simplistic moral interpretations of vastly complex and multivalent events allow finite men to extract meaning and direction from something that seems hopelessly meaningless, tangled, and futile. Yet this approach tended to excuse the victors of their own blunders and malfeasance, while denying the losers not only any legitimacy and credence, but also their very humanity. Germany deserved to be punished, its people slaughtered, and its natural resources drained because they were, after all, the very instantiation of evil itself.

This dangerous disposition and attitude is partially what the German legal and political philosopher Carl Schmitt wrote against in his 1933 book, The Concept of the Political. Schmitt opposed the idea of “absolute enmity” between nations, and, contrary to popular belief, his resurrection of the friend-enemy distinction in politics was meant to temper this temptation. For Schmitt, the distinction between friend and enemy could not be reduced to economic, moral, or aesthetic judgments; instead, it was merely “the other” who, in their national totality, opposed your way of life. Conflict, then, between enemies was not a personal jihad to exterminate evil, but a public fight to preserve one’s own. Having achieved this, the enemy would be allowed to continue their separate way of life as long as they were nullified as a threat to your own.

The Western and American powers, however, took no notice. Instead, they doubled-down on blood guilt and absolute enmity after World War II—regardless of the death toll and suffering it extracted. At the 1943 Casablanca Conference, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanded nothing less than “unconditional surrender” from the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan)—which the U.S. made sure of by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan to force it to its knees. Prior to its surrender in May 1945, Germany has been bombed into oblivion—a consequence of total war. Germany, Italy, and Japan were clearly the aggressors in WWII, but the demand for total surrender and the bloodshed and destruction required to achieve it was not necessary for victory.

While Germany and Japan were to be permanently crippled and made U.S. satellites, Stalin was given a pass. FDR and Churchill were more than willing to work with Stalin throughout the war, even speaking highly of him. At the February 1945 Yalta Conference, Churchill called Stalin a “great man,” while, not to be outdone, FDR assured his cabinet that Stalin wanted “a world of peace and democracy” and had something of “a Christian gentleman” in his nature. If the Western powers were to ally with the Soviets, that relationship had to be moralized and Stalin lionized to be legitimate: there was no realism about pragmatic partnerships with rogue, tyrannical regimes and their cruel leaders. FDR and Churchill’s idealism toward Stalin led to a nightmare for Eastern European nations after the war. Stalin was allowed to annex East Prussia and occupy East Germany, and Poland to annex East Germany. The resulting post-war expulsion of 12-15 million Germans from East-Central Europe resulted in more than two million deaths. The Allies did not complain.

Since the end of the two world wars, the Western powers have continued to use the severe rhetoric of good versus evil in international conflicts. Throughout the Cold War the Soviet Union and her communist allies were the greatest evil and threat to the world, while America was the great liberator. The emergence of the Soviet Union as a world superpower after WWII presented a formidable challenge to the goal of unipolar liberal internationalism. Accordingly, the uneasy multipolarity between the United States and the Soviet Union had to be cast in the strictest moral terms of the forces of light versus the forces of darkness. The implication, of course, was that once darkness was defeated—because certainly the good guys always win—so too would multipolarity. A good and peaceful world order where evil and rogue states have been banished must be unipolar, led by the Western powers who run the world under their watchful and benevolent eye.

Yet even after the fall of the USSR and the achievement of true American unipolarity, the bombast of absolute enmity continued. Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War, Slobodan Milošević (president of Serbia) in the Bosnian and Yugoslavian Wars, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian Civil War were all labeled as evil dictators deserving of dethronement and decapitation. This is not to say, of course, that these men were innocent, only that the rhetoric surrounding international conflict led by the United States and her allies relied upon black-and-white, good-vs-evil binaries to justify Western military intervention (even when unnecessary, illegal, or criminally implemented) and that placed all the blame on the other side. 

In announcing the Desert Storm invasion of Iraq in the First Gulf War on January 16, 1991, George H. W. Bush proclaimed that “this is an historic moment. We have in this past year made great progress in ending the long era of conflict and cold war. We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order—a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations.” He continued with conviction: “The terrible crimes and tortures committed by Saddam’s henchmen against the innocent people of Kuwait are an affront to mankind and a challenge to the freedom of all.”

In the post 9/11 War on Terror prosecuted by the George W. Bush administration, the phrase “axis of evil” appeared on President Bush’s lips in his 2002 State of the Union address in reference to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. In the case of Iraq, “weapons of mass destruction” had to be fabricated to fit the kind of genocidal war crimes that an evil, megalomaniacal dictator would, of course, commit. Similarly to his father, President Bush, in his September 2001 war on terror speech, dictated conditions to the world, saying, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” He made sure to add that America was a representative of truth, goodness, and freedom to the world, and that those nations who cared about such things must join America’s side. “This is not, however, just America’s fight. And what is at stake is not just America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilization’s fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.” In essence, whatever America does is good and advances liberty for all; a threat to America’s freedom is a threat to freedom everywhere, and the survival of liberty in America depends on liberty’s survival in other lands. No greater blank check could be written to morally rationalization endless intervention abroad.

Currently, the same rhetoric is once again being deployed against Russia in its war with Ukraine. Putin is said to be an aggressive dictator, hungry for power and intent on recapturing previous Soviet satellite states. He might as well be, for all intents and purposes, the reincarnation of Stalin, if not Hitler. No one is allowed to have a reasoned, nuanced, or sympathetic understanding of Russia’s side of the war; those who interview him disinterestedly (e.g., Tucker Carlson) are denounced in the strongest terms as a “Russian stooge.” The reality, however, is that the weaponization of moral rhetoric against Putin is meant to cover up America and the West’s responsibility for provoking the war through unrelenting NATO expansion and a sequence of broken promises to the Russian leader.

A World Safe for Democracy

By now, Americans are familiar with how loosely our leaders throw around the term “democracy.” Anything that threatens their power or status is suddenly labeled a “threat to democracy.” The political language and conceptuality of democracy is ancient and complex, and it need not preoccupy us at the moment. In many ways, democratic rhetoric has been part of the American political tradition since 1776, even though the founders were clear in their rejection of a direct democracy and adopted of a republican, mixed regime.

For our purposes, however, the discourse regarding democracy qualitatively changed during the progressive era (1890-1920). This was primarily because many leading progressive intellectuals and statesmen wanted to fundamentally change the nature of American politics and the Constitution, but they could not do so without some kind of democratic justification. America would always be a “democracy,” even if check and balances were struck down, parliamentary government implemented, and an administrative branch added. Progressives styled themselves the defenders of democracy—at home and abroad—even while pushing for radical political and constitutional changes.

Regarding foreign policy, safeguarding and defending democracy has been a central justification for aggression abroad. In his April 1917 war message to Congress asking for a declaration of war and entrance into WWI, President Woodrow Wilson declared that the United States must take up the burden to “fight for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included.” Wilson was unambiguous about his ambitions: “The world must be made safe for democracy.” He quickly added that America did not desire conquest or dominion but was altruistically concerned for the rights and freedoms of other nations. Similarly, FDR, in his December 1940 Arsenal of Democracy speech to the American people, sought to justify the United States’ (illegal) financial and military aid to Britain despite ostensibly being neutral. America, as the world’s paradigmatic democratic country, could not stand idly by while tyranny sought to devour democracy. “Democracy’s fight against world conquest is being greatly aided, and must be more greatly aided, by the rearmament of the United States and by sending every ounce and every ton of munitions and supplies that we can possibly spare to help the defenders who are in the front lines. … We must be the great arsenal of democracy.” Here we have the groundwork laid by FDR to justify exactly what he denied, namely, American world conquest. 

Just like everything else about the postwar LIO, the two World Wars provided ironclad justification and rhetorical rationalization for America to come to democracy’s aid whenever she called. The entire Cold War was billed as the free, democratic West versus the dictatorial, communist East. From Reagan to the Bushes, from Clinton to Obama, America has been the defender of democracy and her enemies the enemies of democracy. Yet throughout the twentieth century, the rhetoric was not static. The ideological progression of democratic rhetoric was from ‘America’s democracy is under attack and needs to be defended,’ to ‘America must defend other democracies overseas,’ to ‘America must establish democracies in countries where there are none,’ to finally, ‘democracy threatened anywhere around the world is a threat to America’s democracy at home.’ This is what “the world must be made safe for democracy” came to eventually mean.

As the reader may have perceived, much of the discourse around democracy, while genuine by many of our leaders (more so in the past than presently), does not match reality. While America’s leaders were talking tough about democracy, they were destroying the consent of the people at home and outsourcing their own responsibility to govern to unelected bureaucrats—both in Washington and at the UN and NATO and the WEF (World Economic Forum). Abroad, democracies were destroyed in the name of democracy, as elections that displeased the hegemon were either rigged or elected leaders overthrown (e.g., Ukraine in 2014). The nature of the LIO makes true democracy a cruel joke: how can a self-determining people electing their own sovereigns be permitted in a global order in which nationalism and independent state action itself has been banned? Instead, setting up “democracies” in foreign lands was really a pretense to established personal fiefdoms and vassal states for the United States.

Conclusion

The Postwar Consensus simply is the Liberal International Order in its ideology, language, organization, and management. It represents a rejection of true national sovereignty, multipolarity, and great power politics under the Law of Nations. It disparages and banishes the political art and replaces it with corporate management. Citizens of specific nations and their natural affections for their unique ways of life are swapped out and forced to become interchangeable global units in a worldwide, consumerist economy. The development and growth of intelligence and security agencies and organizations aid the liberal overseers in managing friend and foe alike, through information and technology control, clandestine espionage, and covert disruptions and deadly strikes. Unquestioned loyalty to the state of Israel, the fear of anti-Semitism and a wildly improbable Nazi resurgence, and the redirection of nationalist fervor onto a Zionist state rather than a Christian one, buttresses the LIO’s claims to be the defenders of humanity. Finally, the liberal world order relentlessly promotes its moral legitimacy through and endless diatribe on faceless human dignity and sweeping human rights, by presenting itself as an unblemished force for good arrayed against axes of darkness, and as the champion and defender of democracy around the world.

The past decade has witnessed the reemergence of Russia and China as competing regional superpowers, an ominous sign of the crumbling influence of the LIO. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 marked the beginning of a new era of multipolarity, shaking the viability of the liberal order in the twenty-first century and threatening to return the world to a pre-modern era of great power politics. Whether or not the Postwar Consensus and the Liberal International Order survives, grows even more powerful, or finally collapses, no one can know. But citizens should be fully aware of what the PWC and LIO are, its goals, ideology, and operations, and the countless ways in which our lives are shaped by its current dominion.

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