This chapter outlines the foreign policy approach of the Biden administration, seeking to restore traditional US global roles and address new challenges from emerging powers and new technology.

This chapter compares the values, beliefs, and policy actions of the Clinton administration after the end of the Cold War and those of the George W. Bush administration after the events of September 11, 2001.

Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft – including defense policy – should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.

The final chapter rounds up the analysis and summarizes the main findings from all previous chapters. It concludes that the United States is indeed a sheriff, but a shrewd sheriff. The chapter contextualizes the main conclusions in the book within the current debates in academic and policy circles about the upending demise of the US world order. The chapter discusses the prospects of the US world order in light of the status of US domestic politics. That is the decisive debate: at the end of the day, that is where the sheriff gets its mandate. Regardless of whether the US world order is fading into the past or it is bound to endure in the future, the institutional logic of a consensual leadership will remain an original feature of how a democratic nation can manage and enforce a world order.

This chapter describes the end of the cold war, the Washington Consensus that drove efforts to reform the institutions and economies of the states that previously had pursued autarkic economic policies, and the counternarratives that pushed back against the Washington Consensus

This chapter describes the proliferation of international organizations created and extended during the 1990s. It puts these developments in the context of liberal internationalism as an extension of the Washington Consensus.

What are the essential features of the post-Cold War world order and how is it likely to evolve? In this chapter, Nuno P. Monteiro analyzes the magnitude of the power shifts that took place around the 1989/91 watershed – between the United States and both Russia and China – and examines the ways in which the post-Cold War order relates to earlier times. Much has changed on the surface, above all the emergence of a preponderant global power, the United States. At the same time, much has also remained the same: the centrality of states, their goals and strategies, the role of material capabilities and ideology in furthering state goals, the effects of the nuclear revolution, and so on. Combining these continuities and changes, Monteiro distills the central features of world order in the post-Cold War era. He then concludes by looking at current transformations in world politics – such as the emergence of a viable alternative to the Western way of life backed by the massive capabilities of the Chinese state – and highlighting the major issues on which the future of world order hangs.

This conclusion makes two arguments. First, it contends that containment strategies need sound “theories of change,” which are predictions about how the pressures of containment will compel the target state to change its behavior without the need for war. A robust theory of change is crucial for maintaining both strategic coherence and domestic political support for containment strategies. I explore this point with a comparison of Cold War and Iraqi containment strategies in which I show that the former policy had a robust theory of change while the latter did not. Second, the conclusion argues that US foreign policy-makers, politicians, and intellectuals have long interpreted the ultimate cause of other states' behavior as stemming from the nature of their political regimes. This type of thinking, inherent to certain strains of liberalism, has often pushed the United States to pursue total solutions by seeking to fundamentally change other states' regimes, as it did with Iraq.

Verdirame argues that liberal internationalism has undergone a largely undetected yet profound transformation in the last decades. As a result of an often unquestioning embrace of the political and legal ideology supranationalism and of globalization, liberal internationalists have slouched towards cosmopolitanism. Yet, cosmopolitanism is a view of the international political order that is at odds with liberal internationalism properly understood. Today’s liberal internationalists, like cosmopolitans, regard world government as both an aspiration and an inevitability. The idea of self-government, which was central to the liberal internationalism of the UN Charter, plays little or no role in this world view. This transformation of liberal internationalism is more evident in Europe, where supranationalism is not merely an ideology but the defining legal and political principle of the EU.

Chapter 4 examines the influence of the Bryce Group’s war prevention plan more broadly, scrutinising the relationship between the League of Nations Society and its counterpart in the United States, the League to Enforce Peace. While scholars have hardly analysed the two groups’ interactions, both groups sprang from the liberal internationalist tradition, had a lot in common in terms of social background and worked for the same aim of reforming the global order. Such similarities, however, did not enable them to establish a constructive collaboration, let alone a transnational movement. In reality, both groups sought political support for their own post-war schemes and regarded their counterpart merely as a medium for approaching statesmen on the other side of the Atlantic. Moreover, the differences in their domestic contexts and in the British and American liberal internationalist traditions hindered the two groups from building mutual trust and a joint lobbying strategy.

Chapter 1 examines the social and intellectual backgrounds of the pro-league of nations movement. Although previous research has focused on the movement’s activity predominantly during the inter-war period, the post-war plan emerged from an older European intellectual tradition. This chapter, therefore, contextualises the pro-league movement into this rich legacy by exploring two broader contexts: the immediate backdrop to the evolution of the movement and the history of ideas about war and peace. In the pre-1914 period, the future pro-league activists already had networks of influence that became the basis of a pro-league movement. While they drew upon a European intellectual legacy, the problems they faced differed from those of their predecessors – the breakdown of the Concert of Europe and the rise of nationalism. These problems led the pro-leaguers to not only develop fresh perspectives on the causes of war, but also conclude that a new world order should be established.

This chapter explores the mutually reinforcing transformations in American state-society and foreign relations engendered by the First World War and its aftermath. Scholars have long recognized the war as a critical event in the emergence of American global power and the concomitant rise of Wilsonian liberal-internationalism. Yet it is the post-World War II period that is typically designated as the decisive moment of epochal rupturing in US history. This chapter seeks to problematize these notions of a sharp epochal break, demonstrating the more fluid lines of continuity between the two periods contextualized within the longue durée of American state-formation. In particular, it highlights the ideo-political and cultural antecedents to Wilson’s liberal internationalist order-building project and its relationship to the defence of white supremacy at home and abroad. In so doing, the chapter demonstrates how the post-1945 US-led Western liberal international order was built upon white supremacist foundations and a particular form of racialized anti-communism that had emerged decades earlier. US hegemonic practices were, on this view, constituted in and through the racial articulation of an anti-communist “common sense” defined by a militantly normative Americanism that found its roots in the First World War period.

This chapter explores how liberal internationalism, the order’s animating 'regime of thought and action', has addressed the question of cultural diversity. It argues that liberal internationalism evinces no simple or singular theory about cultural diversity, and that since the nineteenth century four different approaches are apparent, combining, at distinct moments in time, to form what we see here as distinctive liberal diversity regimes. These approaches are to build a liberal order on the pluralism of Westphalian sovereignty; to confine issues of culture within domestic civil societies; to foster ideas of modernization that would in time erase global cultural differences; and to construct institutions of 'exclusion,' manifest in political hierarchies and, at the extreme, formal empire. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, civilizational and racial prejudices informed how these approaches were interwoven, but by the end of the Cold War these had been replaced with more universalistic conceptions of human rights, multiculturalism, and civic nationalism. It was at this very moment, however, that the now-globalized liberal international order revealed its limits.

Chapter 3 revisits explanations for contradictory US policy via the ideological typology to develop a model of competing conceptions of the international rule of law. Opposition to US legal policy has converged on forms of ‘legalism’, as a set of beliefs that law consists of non-instrumental rules and that the international legal system should be developed by analogy with municipal law. The four ideal types, as well as legalism, are applied to reinterpret the classic Anglo-American conception of the rule of law composed of three elements that, when translated to the global level, are concerned with: how to develop non-arbitrary global governance; how to define equality under IL defined; and how to determine the integrity of international judicial power. Each element of the rule of law has been interpreted in a distinctive form by the competing ideologies, thus establishing a structured contest over principles for designing and developing global legal institutions. The meaning of ‘coherence’ becomes that a legal policymaker’s interpretation of any one of the three elements is a reliable indicator of positions taken on remaining elements.