The liberal international order is dead—again.

If reports from the past month are to be believed, it was killed off by U.S. President Donald Trump, in Greenland, with his unprovoked threats against a NATO ally.

The liberal international order is dead—again.

If reports from the past month are to be believed, it was killed off by U.S. President Donald Trump, in Greenland, with his unprovoked threats against a NATO ally.

But the order has been pronounced dead before. Who was the actual murderer? Was it George W. Bush, in Iraq, with the nuclear lies? Was it Barack Obama, in Syria, with the unenforced red line? Not surprisingly, where we point the finger says a lot about how we view the world.

Sweeping historical changes usually have a number of overlapping causes, all the more so when they’re global in scale. The liberal international order had plenty of enemies, and it has already taken quite a few blows. So is it finally dead, or will it rise once more from the tomb as Trump retreats from his Greenland rhetoric?

An autopsy requires first identifying the corpse. As the decade-long debate over the death of the liberal international order shows, no one quite agrees on what it was. Broadly speaking, though, the term refers to a set of institutions, rules, and values that guided international behavior, either in theory or in practice.

Many elements of this order—the United Nations, for example, or global conventions on human rights and preventing genocide—emerged out of the Second World War, only to be immediately hamstrung by the emerging Cold War conflict. Then, in the 1990s, optimistic U.S. policymakers hoped their belated dreams of a better world could finally be realized. Yet once again, complications quickly ensued.

U.S. President Bill Clinton (right) speaks to American, British, and French troops deployed to Skopje, Macedonia, on June 22, 1999. Many of the troops would become part of KFOR, the NATO-led, international military force deploying into Kosovo on a peacekeeping mission.Department of Defense/Getty Images

The claim that Washington broke the liberal international order by intervening to create an independent Kosovo is a niche one. But it appeals to a particular kind of legalistic leftist with a penchant for contrarianism and geopolitical deep cuts.

In 1999, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic launched a brutal crackdown against ethnic Albanian separatists in Serbia’s Kosovo region. Having belatedly intervened to stop Milosevic’s genocidal war in Bosnia a few years earlier, the Clinton administration acted much faster this time. The United States bombed Serbia and organized a NATO-led, U.N.-backed peacekeeping force to Kosovo. This laid the groundwork for much of the international community to recognize Kosovo as an independent state in 2008—over Serbia’s strident objections.

Managing the global order with an antagonistic Washington.

The commentariat persists in misrepresenting the U.S. president and his actions.

For many liberal internationalists, who had watched U.S. President Bill Clinton’s dithering in Bosnia with mounting outrage, this prompt action represented one of the first examples of the envisioned Liberal International Order actually working the way that it was supposed to. Where Cold War dynamics had made such intervention by bodies such as the United Nations impossible since the Korean War, Russia was now too weak to object. As a result, NATO could move decisively to restore order and uphold human........

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