Note: The liberal world order is also
known as the “international rules-based order” or “liberal international
order.” While international institutions such as the United Nations,
the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation were
established as the blueprint for the liberal world order, the system was
really powered by the United States. Read more HERE and HERE.
Francis Fukuyama declared the
“End of History” in 1989, stating that Western liberal democracy had
become the final form of human government.
However, by 2026, the liberal
world order appears to be coming to an end, with countries like China
and the US disregarding international law and pursuing their own
interests.
A new world order, possibly
based on multipolar realism, may replace liberalism, where nations
prioritise their own power and interests over idealistic notions of
cooperation and democracy.
By Benjamin Bartee, 18 January 2026
Back in 1989, renowned political
scientist Francis Fukuyama got a little bit over his skis, as they say,
when he enthusiastically welcomed in a new (and emphatically final)
geopolitical epoch, audaciously dubbed the “End of History.”
From ‘The End of History?’ (1989):
The
twentieth century saw the developed world descend into a paroxysm of
ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of
absolutism, then Bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that
threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war. But the
century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of
Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle
to where it started: not to an “end of ideology” or a convergence
between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an
unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.
The
triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the
total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western
liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable
changes in the intellectual climate of the world’s two largest communist
countries, and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both.
But this phenomenon extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also
in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such
diverse contexts as the peasants’ markets and colour television sets now
omnipresent throughout China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing
stores opened in the past year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into
Japanese department stores, and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague,
Rangoon, and Tehran.
What we
may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing
of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as
such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the
universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government. (Emphasis added)
Liberalism today, liberalism tomorrow, liberalism forever! – to paraphrase notorious Alabama segregationist George Wallace.
In chronological context, it was an
understandable misapprehension that afflicted Fukuyama and clouded his
crystal ball; in 1989, getting high on the liberal order supply was
easy.
No serious ideological rivals to
liberalism existed any longer at the international level; the liberal
order, with the United States at the head, exercised global hegemony;
everybody in the world over wanted a pair of blue jeans and a Chevy
Corvette and a hot blonde on their arm and all of the glorious excesses
of liberal capitalism.
Alas, the utopian “End of History,”
ironically, didn’t last long; by 2026, universalist liberalism had now
reached what very much looks like the end of the line – a mere three and
a half decades since Fukuyama declared it the “final form of human
government.”
So-called “international law,” which
underpins the global liberal order, has always been heavier on the
aspiration and lighter on the actual, existing in a nether-region
between theory and practicality, applied and adhered to erratically and
arbitrarily – with no consequences for those who violate it, provided
they have the military power to thwart attempts at accountability.
Lots of examples abound, but a prime
one, which has received relatively little attention with the heavy media
focus on Latin America and the Middle East, was Xi
Jinping announcing in his New Year’s address that the forced
“reunification” of Taiwan into the budding Sino Empire is “unstoppable” – a barely veiled flouting of the international powers that would threaten to oppose such a move militarily.
(I predict China will pull the trigger
on the kinetic invasion before the end of the year if it can’t submit
Taiwan through economic or political pressure under threat of military
action. The latter approach it would prefer for reasons of optics and
because Taiwan is ethnically Chinese, likely tempering the bloodlust as
the Chinese view the Taiwanese as their kin.)
While China has long signalled its
intent to reclaim Taiwan, which it lost in the middle of the last
century as the last stronghold of the nationalists fighting the CCP, Xi
would not have offered such direct talk just a year ago. Yet, inch by
inch, as the liberal order loses its grip on geopolitics, with it goes
the diplomatic imperative to couch rhetoric in terms in keeping with
international law.
In the same vein, Trump has more or
less openly admitted that the political, economic and military pressure
applied to Venezuela, including the capture of its president, is about regional hegemony and natural resources:
“We are going to have our very large United States oil companies go in,
spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken oil infrastructure and
start making money for the country,” he said.
The Western hemisphere “belongs to
us,” the mantra has gone of late. (“Us” meaning, ostensibly, the United
States and the citizens thereof, although I don’t feel it belongs to me
as an American citizen quite as much as it will soon belong to
Blackrock, Palantir and Chevron.)
In a way, the Venezuela rhetoric is
much more honest than the obviously insincere 2003-era talk of
delivering “democracy” to Iraq, Afghanistan, et al. Those
countries were never going to adopt “democracy” even if the United
States government insisted on it – which, despite the nonstop lip
service, it didn’t anyway because it didn’t care much for constitutional
republicanism at home, let alone abroad. Nonetheless, liberal etiquette
required the lie to maintain the façade that the world runs on
democratic values.
So, what will replace international liberalism?
Something, probably, on the order of
multipolar realism – again, much less idealistic yet much more honest in
a world that hitherto has functioned on pretty lies.
Via Independent Institute (emphasis added):
Realism is one of the prominent international relations theories for explaining the behaviour of states. The core essence of realism is an attempt to explain “world politics as they really are, rather than describe how they ought to be,” presenting
the world as a state of anarchy where nations, acting as unitary
rational actors, compete with each other to maximise their power, “the only – variable of interest.”
Realism is
often juxtaposed with liberalism, the belief that the “national
characteristics of individual States matter for their international
relations” and that it is possible for different types of regimes to
operate in different ways, such as Kant’s theory of democratic peace. Liberal
“institutionalism,” the ideology on which diplomats in the West are
brought up, is the belief that “international institutions facilitate
cooperation and peace among countries.” The difference between these schools of thought can be understood through their perspectives on international institutions.
While liberals assume that organisations like the United Nations are a genuine platform for international cooperation, realists
assume that these institutions do very little to prevent states from
pursuing their interests and can very often serve as a vector through
which state interests are pursued.
Further reading from The Exposé:
About the Author
Benjamin Bartee, author of ‘Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile’, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist. He publishes articles on two Substack pages: ‘Armageddon Prose’ and ‘Armageddon Safari’. You can follow Amageddon Prose on Twitter (now X) HERE. If you would like to support his work, you can donate HERE.
