Jervis, Robert; Goddard, Stacie E.; Labrosse, Diane N.; Rovner, Joshua; Fujii, George, eds.. Chaos Reconsidered: The Liberal Order and the Future of International Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. 544 pp. $140.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780231205986.$35.00 (paper), ISBN 9780231205993. 
Reviewed by Lora A. Viola (Freie Universität Berlin)
Published on H-Diplo (March, 2024)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=59776
Anticipating a repeat election showdown with former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden warned, “America, as we begin this election year, we must be clear: Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.” Invoking the specter of a second Trump presidency, he admonished that “the alternative to democracy is dictatorship.”[1] The looming 2024 US presidential election—already destined to be unprecedented given the likely choice between the oldest president in United States history and the first candidate to run while accused of instigating insurrection and embroiled in numerous criminal legal proceedings—will also take place in a global context characterized by what commentators for some time now have been calling a “polycrisis” environment. The term, used by president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker in the momentous year 2016 and popularized by economic historian Adam Tooze in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, captures the confluence of disparate crises that interact in ways that increase uncertainty and instability.[2] Since “polycrisis” entered common usage to capture the complexity of simultaneously facing a global pandemic, climate catastrophes, and economic instability, several more international crises have unfolded, including Russia’s war against Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war and its potential spillover into a broader regional conflict. The institutions of the liberal international order (LIO), such as the United Nations, have appeared fragmented and weak in the face of these challenges, while the United States seems once again to have become an indispensable military and diplomatic leader. However, the United States’ domestic polarization and the uncertain outcome of the next election hold the potential to bring more, rather than less, instability to the world. The outcome of a Biden-Trump contest will be highly consequential both for the path the United States takes domestically and for how the world addresses the polycrises it faces.
Chaos Reconsidered: The Liberal Order and the Future of International Politics, provides invaluable insights for grasping what this political moment might portend for international politics. Although not directly referenced in the title, the book grapples with the legacy of Trump’s 2017-21 presidential term for US foreign policy and international relations. Edited by the late Robert Jervis, Diane N. Labrosse, Stacie E. Goddard, and Joshua Rovner, the book brings together around fifty scholars with a range of expertise and disciplinary backgrounds to consider how Trump’s nationalism, populism, and disregard for established norms affected the LIO, the United States’ relationships with its allies and adversaries, and its ability to be a global leader. The volume is a sequel to the 2018 book Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century, which emerged out of an H-Diplo/International Security Studies Forum organized in the immediate aftershock of Trump’s first presidential win to consider to what extent his politics and policies would constitute a radical departure from US foreign policy and US leadership of the LIO.[3] This book, in contrast, is primarily retrospective, leveraging the distance of several years to take stock of the origins and consequences of Trump’s politics, although it also briefly considers to what extent Biden’s presidency might reverse or repair some of those consequences. The chapters are concise (about ten pages each) but also original and analytical, drawing on insights from international relations (IR) scholars and historians in order to place the contemporary case within a larger theoretical and historical context. The book is divided into eight parts, beginning with an assessment of whether and how Trump’s presidency challenges IR theories and then covering more empirical topics, such as the historical context of Trump’s “America First” approach, his administration’s impact on international institutions, how his presidency affected the United States’ relations with a range of specific countries and regions, and how his politics have affected liberal internationalism. While most of the essays are critical of the Trump presidency and its consequences, Randall Schweller’s chapter offers a more favorable reading of what he sees as the strategic nature of Trump’s realist foreign policy in the context of changing structures of domestic and international power that together have made “Trumpism virtually impossible to dislodge” (p. 62).
Apart from these traditional foreign policy topics, part 5 of the volume is devoted to what the title refers to as “The Expanding Meaning of International Security,” including topics such as human rights, racial justice, economic inequality, climate change, and other forms of structural inequality in light of human security. Given that IR as a discipline has largely marginalized the legacies of structural racism in both US foreign policy and world order-making,[4] it is notable that this section includes four chapters that deal centrally with race in US foreign policy and international relations (e.g., those by William Hitchcock, Jason Ludwig and Rebecca Slayton, Nivi Manchanda, and Audie Klotz). Their treatment goes beyond merely pointing to the vulgar nature of Trump’s rhetoric and instead seeks to understand “the ways that race is woven into the structures of power through which the United States acts in the world” (Hitchcock, p. 294). Even more noteworthy is how the issue of race and racism is not limited to this devoted section but also cuts across many chapters in the volume (for instance, to point to a few, those by Michael Barnett, Deborah Avant, Ryan Irwin, Samuel Zipp, John Thompson, Christy Thornton, Joshua Busby, and Jonathan Monten) and is at least mentioned by almost all. It seems that one consequence of the Trump administration and Trumpism for the field of IR is to have made visible and explicit the all too often unseen intersection of race and international politics.
More generally, the book takes seriously the idea that “as the international system becomes more complex, the lines between domestic and foreign issues are blurred, as are the relations between cause and effect” (p. 8). In this context, the book considers the security rationales of issues often “sidelined” as primarily domestic in nature, such as migration, health, and climate policy (p. 329). Several contributions highlight how domestic vulnerabilities, including those resulting from structural inequalities, should be considered a priority for national security (e.g., the contributions by Deborah Avant and Ludwig and Slayton, among others). Sarah Snyder’s chapter considers how the Trump administration’s undermining of human rights commitments abroad went hand-in-hand with their erosion at home. While considering these “second image” issues, however, the book does seem to miss the opportunity to address the “second image reversed.” In particular, it does not consider how the development of the American national security state—primarily built to counter foreign threats—can become a threat to American democracy. With the rhetoric of political violence increasingly endorsed and legitimated by Trump, and at the very latest when Trump’s lawyers argued that using the US military for the assassination of a political rival would be protected under presidential immunity, there is urgency in considering how America’s military prowess abroad and political violence at home might be related or reinforcing.[5]
Taken as a whole, the volume aims to offer careful consideration of “whether Trump constituted a profound challenge to the order” (p. 4) and what, if anything, we can learn from those years for the future of international politics. However, there is considerable variation in whether the authors view Trump as an anomaly in the history of US foreign policy, as simply having lifted the veil on “the darker true self” (Irwin, p. 85) of US foreign policy, as the logical result of domestic polarization or ongoing structural changes in the global balance of power, or as the tip of the iceberg—a harbinger—of a radical shift in US domestic and foreign policy. Another way to address this question could have been to put Trump’s presidency not only in historical but also in international comparative context. In 2016, Trump may have appeared as an anomaly, but today he belongs to a recurring type of nationalist-populist leader that has appeared in several countries around the world, such as Brazil, Argentina, and Hungary. The common causes of this international phenomenon and the consequences of the international diffusion of populist leaders and ideas, certainly has implications for how we understand the past and future of the liberal international order, institutionalized cooperation, responses to conflicts and crises, and the defense of the rule of law.
The collection of various perspectives assembled here is without a doubt a rich and useful resource for academics, students, and the interested public. Yet, the book overall leaves the central question of how to situate the Trump presidency in the arc of history unresolved. To be fair, of course, this is too much to expect from either this book or our theories and, as Barnett wisely reminds us, “much of the meaning we give to this unsettling period will depend on what comes next” (p. 28). But given the current political moment and what might come next, the book may turn out to be too careful in its considerations. Indeed, there is no small likelihood that the current book will have to be revisited again, raising the possibility that the current double feature of the Chaosseries will soon become a trilogy. Seen in this light, then, one way to appreciate the significance of this book, along with its prequel, is as a documentation of how IR theorists and historians have been thinking about Trumpism as it has unfolded, providing valuable source material for how the field’s own thinking is evolving at a moment of uncertainty and polycrisis.
Notes
[1]. Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden on the Third Anniversary of the January 6th Attack and Defending the Sacred Cause of American Democracy,” Blue Bell, PA, January 5, 2024, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/01/05/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-third-anniversary-of-the-january-6th-attack-and-defending-the-sacred-cause-of-american-democracy-blue-bell-pa/.
[2]. Jean-Claude Juncker, “Speech at the Annual General Meeting of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises,” Athens, June 21, 2016, http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-16-2293_en.htm; Adam Tooze, “Welcome to the World of the Polycrisis,” Financial Times, October 28, 2022, https://www.ft.com/content/498398e7-11b1-494b-9cd3-6d669dc3de33.
[3.] Robert Jervis, Francis J. Gavin, Joshua Rovner, and Diane Labrosse, eds., Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
[4]. Robbie Shilliam, “Race and Racism in International Relations: Retrieving a Scholarly Inheritance,” International Politics Review 8 (2020): 152-95.
[5]. Adam Liptak, “Trump’s Boldest Argument Yet: Immunity from Prosecution for Assassinations,” New York Times, January 10, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/us/politics/trump-immunity-prosecution-assassination.html.
Citation: Lora A. Viola. Review of Jervis, Robert; Goddard, Stacie E.; Labrosse, Diane N.; Rovner, Joshua; Fujii, George, eds.. Chaos Reconsidered: The Liberal Order and the Future of International Politics. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. March, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=59776
