Review of The Collapse of Global Liberalism: And the Emergence of the Post Liberal World Order by Philip Pilkington (Polity Books, 2025).
Many of the cornerstones of the postwar liberal order are being shattered. The focus of Donald Trump’s second presidency has largely been about overturning liberal norms, whether that means running roughshod over the World Trade Organization with his global tariff offensive or publicly dismissing the United Nations as irrelevant and sanctioning the International Criminal Court. Perhaps most blatantly of all, his proposed schemes for Gaza have veered from ethnic cleansing to seeking to rule the territory as a modern-day viceroy on the ruins of a US-backed genocide.
Far from pushing back against this offensive, the European co-architects of the post–World War II global order have been awestruck. European states did not express a murmur of discontent at Trump’s plan to install himself and Tony Blair as Gaza’s rulers. Britain’s Labour Government has been so keen to get into Trump’s good graces that it granted him a royal state visit in September — one that was so grandiose it looked like a meeting between monarchs in the sixteenth century.
Liberal diplomatic protocol, where all heads of state are treated as equals, has been dismissed. This was neatly symbolized by the photo of Trump sitting behind his desk in the White House while the other NATO countries and the head of the European Commission are corralled around it like naughty school children.
When Trump met Vladimir Putin in Alaska in August to try to strike a deal on the Ukraine war, there was no pretense that this was anything other than a case of two imperial powers trying to slice up Ukraine between them. There is no longer any attempt to dress the American empire in the liberal clothing of multilateralism and universal human rights.
The decline of liberalism is about much more than international relations. The neoliberal model of capitalism hit the rocks in…
Auteur: Ben Wray
