Why I Didn’t Sign Up to Defend the International Order

Last week, a group of prominent international relations scholars published an ad in the New York Times under the headline “Why We Should Preserve International Institutions and Order.” You can find the text and a list of signatories here. The scholars who drafted the ad are a who’s who of experts on international political economy, but the list of endorsers also includes many people who work on other aspects of international relations, including security, gender, and other topics.

The ad is directed at U.S. President Donald Trump’s disregard for—if not outright hostility toward—the various institutions that have been prominent in world politics for the past 60-plus years. It argues that the “international order formed after World War II provides important benefits to the United States,” and declares that “U.S. leadership helped to create this system” and has “long been critical for its success.” It acknowledges that the United States has borne a “significant share of the costs” of this order but has also “greatly benefited from its rewards.” The signatories are “alarmed” by Trump’s repeated attacks on these arrangements, which they describe as “reckless.” While conceding that the “global order is certainly in need of major changes,” they nonetheless warn of a descent into chaos if today’s institutions are discarded.

I was invited to sign the ad, and I gave serious thought to doing so. Its sponsors are scholars from whom I’ve learned much over the years, and some of the people who signed it are valued colleagues or personal friends. Having helped with two earlier public statements (one opposing the invasion of Iraq in 2002, and another endorsing the nuclear deal with Iran), I certainly think it is appropriate for scholars to make their views known to the public in this way. And I share the signatories’ dismay at Trump’s incompetent handling of foreign policy, which has done considerable damage to the U.S. position already and is likely to do more in the future.

But in the end, I decided I could not put my name on the ad, despite my respect for its authors, sympathy for their aims, and agreement with some of what they had said. Let me explain why.

For starters, the ad lumps together a set of disparate institutions that it says have characterized the post-World War II order, including the United Nations, NATO, the World Trade Organization, and the European Union. Moreover, it credits them with the past 60 years of prosperity and the absence of war among the major powers. There is no doubt some basis for this claim (and one could add institutions such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty to the mix), but it is not obvious to that each of these institutions was equally important in producing these benefits. For a realist like me, for example, bipolarity and the existence of nuclear weapons did more to prevent major power war than any of the institutions cited in this ad. ...