Europe After the End of the Liberal International Order | by Mark Leonard - Project Syndicate

Europe after the end of the liberal international order

Cover image: picture alliance / abaca | Pool/ABACA Throughout Europe, US president Donald Trump is seen as a chaos-monger with a reverse Midas touch: everything he touches ends up worse than he found it. Yet despite his anachronistic views on most issues, he is the perfect embodiment of our era. In 2021, I authored The Age of Unpeace, which argued that we need to start reimagining the rules of international relations for an era of hyper-connecti…

Europe After the End of the Liberal International Order | by Mark Leonard - Project Syndicate

As Europeans rearm to confront Russian aggression, they also need to figure out how to survive in the age of "unpeace" that Donald Trump and other strongmen are ushering in. The old interdependencies that liberals took for granted no longer ensure peace, prosperity, or stability.

This article was originally published in Catalonia Plural. You can read it in catalan here. For more than four decades, US foreign policy was built on a belief that structured its foreign policy: the idea that economic development would end sooner rather than later, generating institutional forms related to liberal democracy. Trade was not, in this scheme, a mere exchange of goods but a civilizational tool. Integrating authoritarian economies in…

The recent shift in US foreign policy has had global security and international trade implications.

CAMBRIDGE – In August 1914, Europeans saw little value in the century of peace that had followed Napoleon’s defeat in Waterloo. As historian Barbara W. Tuchman relates in her 1962 book, The Guns of August, public opinion in Berlin, Paris, London and Vienna was overrun by a wave of collective euphoria: a febrile excitement at the expected benefits of a rapid and decisive world war. The result was four years of misery and devastation.A similar sen…

At a time when everything is getting worse in the East, where alliances as evil as the duo Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are born, and where our leaders are advocating rearmament, we wanted to take the time to think about it. With Gilbert Achcar, a specialist in international relations and professor at the University of London, we talked about ways to support Ukraine while rejecting a generalized war. Published in CQFD n°240 (April 2025) Illus…