Don’t Give Up So Quickly on the Liberal International Order
With Israel’s strikes we have recklessly moved into a Warring States period.
My knowledge of Chinese history is really very limited, but I remember, when the concepts of the Spring and Autumn period and Warring States period were introduced in middle school, being somehow very impressed. The premise seemed to be that history folded neatly into eras, and each era had its own geopolitical conception to it. The Spring and Autumn period was built on a sense of gradual dissolution—the beautiful sandcastle of the Zhou dynasty was being slowly swept away by the tide, but there were certain norms instituted in the society and a degree of harmony with the various states maintaining delicate balances with one another. By the Warring States period, a different logic prevails altogether—it’s zero-sum politics, with powerful actors jockeying against each other, forming alliances and betraying those alliances with the alacrity of schoolboys playing Risk.
Almost ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, I’ve had the odd sensation—like the ghost of Mencius whispering in my ear or something—of one dispensation giving way to another, of finally finding ourselves in a Warring States period. That seemed to be cemented this week when Israel, after resisting temptation for 20-odd years, gave in to it and struck Iran—not just hitting Iran’s nuclear program, but also assassinating generals, bombing the state TV station, and striking at Iran’s governance capacity.
It wasn’t so much war in the Middle East that was the shock but the reaction in the West, or rather the lack thereof. There were no particular concerns about whether the strike was just or not, or even about the liberal international order—the idea that states are by default guaranteed their sovereignty, that even our enemies are dealt with through diplomacy, treaties, or, at a push, economic sanctions rather than military force. Up to a couple of years ago, we all seemed to take these principles very seriously. But now I see Garry Kasparov, for instance, writing in The Free Press that the “status quo … was always just that: an illusion.” He continued, “The historic Israeli military campaign against Iran that began yesterday represents another crack in that facade [of post-Cold War stability], joining the October 7 attacks, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, and the Arab Spring.”
What’s so startling is not just that we seem to be in a Warring States period, but that we have so quickly adopted its logic—including the presumption that the “liberal international order” always was a kind of papier-mâché construction, which would collapse as soon as things got serious and brute force took its place. I respect Kasparov just about as much as I respect anybody alive, and that makes me wonder whether somehow everybody else got the memo that the liberal international order was just a rhetorical device and it was only a few simps like myself and Ben Rhodes (the butt of Kasparov’s op-ed) who believed in it.
But I did believe in it and I continue to do so, and I have the terrible feeling—and have had really since both the vicious Hamas attack of 10/7 and Israel’s disproportionate response to it—that not only are we rushing into an era of destruction and zero-sum thinking, but that we are doing so unnecessarily, out of a faulty logic of ersatz realpolitik, when in fact states benefit strategically from being part of the liberal international order.
Let’s think about Israel’s position in 2022 or early 2023 compared to now. Back then, Israel enjoyed broad support across the West. It was understood to be a democratic nation operating in a dangerous part of the world. Iran may well have posed an “existential threat” to Israel, as Benjamin Netanyahu famously put it, not least through its sweeping support for proxies bent on Israel’s destruction. But there really had been international agreements in place to limit Iran’s ability to, for example, secure nuclear weapons. Of course, the situation with Palestinians was insuperably difficult, but Israel—whatever its flaws—had given a degree of autonomy to Palestinians. Arab nations were involved in maintaining the status quo and Israel was close to normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia. The Abraham Accords were a declaration of faith that Iran could be sidelined through international agreements and treaties.
All of this is to say that Israel’s problems at that stage were largely in the realm of police action—you know, pay attention if Hamas is training right outside a guard fence; listen if Egyptian intelligence warns about an imminent attack. But that all went wrong, of course, and now Israel finds itself in a completely different geopolitical layout and beholden to a very different mentality. For the vastly foreseeable future, Israel has committed itself to playing Middle Eastern whac-a-mole, knocking out first the war-making capacity of Hamas, then of Hezbollah, then of the Houthis, then finally of Iran itself.
So far, that hasn’t been the worst bet in the world. Israel’s tactics—the exploding pagers, the drone base in Iran—have really been very impressive. Hezbollah may have shown itself to be a paper tiger. What most Israelis would likely say is that this is simply the way it has always been—Israel has been in a constant state of war since its founding and survival rests exclusively on maintaining strategic advantages.
But if the success of the early days of the Iran strike seem to validate that thinking, it’s hard to imagine from a geopolitical standpoint that the permanent game of whac-a-mole is really Israel’s most expeditious foreign policy. Iran isn’t actually going to go anywhere, and neither are any of the Arab states surrounding Israel and neither, for that matter, are the Palestinians. It’s always going to be a dangerous neighborhood, and the triumph of Israel over the course of its history hasn’t hinged on endlessly aggressive operations. Rather, it’s been, yes, to establish deterrence, and then to gradually convince its chief adversaries—which, for a long time, were Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc.—that it was better all around for everyone to keep the peace. The Camp David Accords actually did mean something, and the nearly-50 years of stability that Israel has had with its immediate neighbors (at one time implacable adversaries) give the lie to the notion that diplomacy, and the concert of nations, are for soft dolts only.
For Israel to engage in preemptive strikes against a nation state, which also involves a large number of civilian deaths and clearly goes beyond only targeting the nuclear program, undercuts Israel’s strongest argument in any future diplomatic negotiations—which is that it is a nation state, part of a larger community of nations, and deserves to be left alone within its borders.
What seems to be happening on the world stage is one set of assumptions giving way to another—with the sanctity of the nation state and the presumption of diplomacy replaced by blocs doing everything they can think of to outmaneuver one another. Even from the standpoint of strategic thinking, that may be disadvantageous.
The reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shows just how entrenched the Spring and Autumn mindset was until quite recently. The global outcry against Russia’s aggression wasn’t primarily about the security of NATO or the rest of Europe, or wherever the hegemonic bloc was situated. Those things were concerns, but Western intervention in Ukraine wasn’t necessarily beneficial in narrow strategic terms—it involved provoking Russia for the benefit of a country that wasn’t a member of NATO or the EU.
Rather, the outcry was based on the fact that there was an international system in place—it was based on respect for the nation state, and Ukraine, all strategic considerations to the side, was part of the community of nations and accordingly deserved protection. It’s that set of principles that underscores the international support that Ukraine continues to enjoy. And not only Ukraine. It’s respect for the notion of the nation state that enables broad coalitions to form—whether that is United Nations forces protecting South Korea in 1950, or a coalition of 35 countries pushing Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Lose the relatively clear line in the sand that the liberal international order represents and it becomes very difficult to find the moral force for building large-scale and robust alliances.
That is as true when it comes to Iran as it is for anyone else. Yes, it had been a concern that, according to a recent IAEA report, Iran “significantly increased production … of highly enriched uranium,” but there are protocols in place for situations like this. When the Director General of the IAEA tells CNN, “We did not have any proof of a systematic effort [by Iran] to move into a nuclear weapon”—and when U.S. intelligence services largely agree with that assessment—Israel’s justification for its strikes becomes very thin and gets much closer to the domain of brute force.
The defenders of actions like Israel’s would argue that this is just the way of things and it’s time we adapted our thinking to reflect a Warring States mentality. But I am not ready to say goodbye to the Spring and Autumn period quite yet. The liberal international order did, actually, work really well. It preserved thirty-plus years of peace in the post-Cold War period and it provided the organizing principle for protecting Ukraine at a time when Putin assumed that, for geopolitical reasons, everybody else would bail out. It was in the United States’ interest to have a steady set of principles rooted in the sanctity of the nation state. And it was in Israel’s interest to be a stalwart member of the international community and to enjoy the deep support of the Western world.
All of that already seems to be forgotten, as if it never existed, and the logic of Warring States touches more and more parts of the globe. Maybe there’s an inevitability to that. But let’s at the minimum recognize that there was something vital in what’s been lost—and that it will take strenuous work to build it back again.
Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
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Iran is the primary sponsor of terrorism. The Islamic culture of death fanatic extremists in control are completely transparent in their interest to destroy Israel and Western civilization. This is different than say North Korea in that at least the leaders of that control demonstrate survival self interest.
They cannot acquire nuclear ballistic weapons. Full stop.
Beyond that there are legit arguments against global order meddling in other foreign political and conflict outcomes.
Sam, go back and study your history. The founding ideology of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), established after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, explicitly positions the elimination of Israel as a core objective—both ideologically and strategically.
The official statements of the IRG and state-sponsored publications over the decades have made this goal unmistakably clear. The eradication of Israel has been stated as religious duty and a geopolitical imperative. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has repeatedly referred to Israel as a “cancerous tumor” that must be removed, and the IRG has operationalized this stance by supporting proxy groups like Hezbollah and Hamas with funding, training, and weapons.
The idea that you can get this cancer within Islam to the camp fire to sing kumbaya is the ignorant basis of the US policy we have imposed on Israel for decades. Israel finally understands this and is acting accordingly.