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International Affairs 94: 1 (2018) 133–150; doi: 10.1093/ia/iix238 © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] The postwar liberal international order (LIO) has been a largely US creation. Washington’s consensus, geopolitically bound to the western ‘core’ during the Cold War, went global with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the advent of systemic unipolarity. Many criticisms can be levelled at US leadership of the LIO, not least in respect of its claim to moral superiority, albeit based on laudable norms such as human rights and democracy. For often cynical reasons the US backed authoritarian regimes throughout the Cold War, pursued disastrous forms of regime change after its end, and has been deeply hostile to alternative (and often non-western) civilizational orders that reject its dogmas. Its successes, however, are manifold. Its ‘empire by invitation’ has helped secure a durable European peace, soften east Asian security dilemmas, and underwrite the strategic preconditions for complex and pacifying forms of global interdependence. Despite tactical differences between global political elites, a postwar commitment to maintain the LIO, even in the context of deep structural shifts in international relations, has remained resolute—until today. The British vote to leave the EU (arguably as much a creation of the United States as of its European members), has weakened one of the most important institutions of the broader US-led LIO. More destabilizing to the foundations of the LIO has been the election of President Trump. His administration has actively encouraged the breakup of the EU, questioned enduring US global security alliances such as NATO, and seen the advocacy of an economic nationalism that threatens to reverse globalization.1 If the dominant cultural paradigm of the early post-Cold War period was the end of history as a triumphant liberal internationalism flattened global geopolitical space, Trump’s victory represents the end of this interregnum: a rearticulation of the primacy of the nation-state, a fracture in the postwar liberal internationalist consensus and a hardening of geopolitical revisionism. Even if we dismiss President Trump’s statements as mere rhetoric, his capacity to motivate millions to vote for him, as well as broader centrifugal movements including Brexit, signal a