The National Interest: Politics After GlobalizationBy Philip CunliffePolity, 2025

For the bulk of the post-Cold War period, centrist liberals had been associated with economic globalization, multilateral institutions and cosmopolitanism. Liberals may have been aligned with nationalists against the conservative empires of the 19th century and the communist ones of the 20th. But in the 21st century, mainstream Western politicians have insisted that nationalist demagogues pose a threat to liberal democracy. Then, something bizarre happened with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022: nationalism made a comeback in the West, but only in a limited way. “Populist” political forces continued to be associated with chauvinism and xenophobia by the class of bien pensants. But at the same time, despite its historical association with a darker historical undercurrent of Ukrainian nationalism, it became perfectly acceptable for Western liberal politicians to chant “Slava Ukraini!” In other words, Western nationalism, bad; Ukrainian nationalism, good (pp.119-22).

This is just one example of several that Philip Cunliffe covers in his recent book The National Interest: Politics After Globalization, exhibiting Western countries’ ongoing inability to put their foreign policies on coherent conceptual footing. Cunliffe argues for a return to a politics based on the national interest after decades of growing postwar transnationalism – and that such a world has the potential to be more peaceful than a world of competing abstract principles (2025, p.54).

After the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberal principles emerged unchallenged in their ability to capture modernity – and hegemonic in their ability to shape it. Yet, liberalism has a long history of malleability, at times defending cultural pluralism and at others, uncompromisingly promoting liberal ideals. With the war in Ukraine, we have witnessed another transformation, away from the triumphalism of the “end of history” and back toward Wilsonian idealism and the defence of national self-determination. No longer praising interdependence as the foundation of perpetual peace, liberals now champion Ukraine’s “right to choose” and now warn of the risks of “weaponized interdependence.”

Yet, despite liberalism’s ability........

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