Opinion – Ross Douthat: Liberal order is in crisis, but from Russia to Iran illiberalism is heading for darkness

The worldview behind Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine assumed the following premises: The West and the United States are in decline, decadent and internally divided.

The globalized world is becoming multipolar, with “civilization-states” re-emerging and competing to claim their spheres of influence. And Russia and China, in particular, represent powerful alternatives to Western liberalism, ready to fight for global dominance.

As bad as the war was for Putin, some of these analyzes still hold up. The world did respond to the war in Ukraine on multipolar lines. Saudi Arabia’s disdain of the Biden administration’s call to pump more oil is just the latest example of how the anti-Russian coalition is essentially a Western coalition, with India, China and the Arab world playing more skeptical and complex roles.

Meanwhile, the unity of the West, while obviously stronger than Putin expected, is still a tenuous net thrown over deeper vulnerabilities. There was no sustained post-Covid-19 growth or a new era of good feelings.

The populist wave is not receding; since the Ukrainian War began, the European establishment has suffered political disappointments and defeats in Sweden, Hungary and Italy. Two of the governments most committed to defending Ukraine, Joe Biden’s in the US and the British Conservative, do poorly in the approval polls. Europe is just beginning to feel the cost of its naive energy policies, and Western economies are caught between measures that fuel inflation and solutions that could induce recession.

So, in key ways, the world still looks like what Putin imagined more than seven months ago, with clear opportunities for a powerful challenger to the liberal world order. But today we know something he didn’t know when he ordered the invasion: Russia is not such a powerful adversary, and its claims to represent an alternative to the liberal West have melted into Ukrainian mud.

It is not just the Putin regime that is showing signs of illiberal collapse. Beijing still looks far more powerful than Moscow, but China’s early Covid-19 successes have given way to a seemingly insane attempt to sustain a zero Covid policy without regard to the cost to prosperity, domestic tranquility and influence. global.

At the same time, Iran, whose Islamic republic represents a different kind of rival to Western liberalism, faces a wave of protests that, while not toppling the regime, are a reminder that the Islamic Revolution is wildly unpopular today.

As the right-wing provocateur Richard Hanania — often critical of liberal pieties and American self-esteem — acknowledged in a recent essay, 2022 was very good for Francis Fukuyama’s well-worn argument that liberal democracy has no plausible ideological competitors. Liberalism has many enemies, to be sure, and relative to the point of origin of Fukuyama’s 1989 “End of History” argument, the liberal order is showing clear signs of internal decay.

But the desire for alternatives is not enough to make them exist; rather, we are seeing that a world system can dramatically weaken without its rivals being ready to supplant it.

If Russia is the biggest and ugliest failure, China is the most interesting case. It was always clear that Putinism existed in an imitative, parodic relationship with the West — as a pseudo-democracy, not a true rival with a different source of legitimacy. But in recent decades China has seemed to be creating something more stable and self-legitimizing, a one-party meritocracy capable of managing peaceful transitions from one leader to another, resistant to personality cults and capable of managing rapid economic and technological progress.

But the combination of Xi Jinping’s consolidation of personal power and his regime’s conspicuous failures (in economic management and soft power diplomacy, not just those of Covid zero) suggest that China’s system is returning to an authoritarian milieu, which the idea of ​​a one-party meritocracy collapses and returns to mere dictatorship at the moment you have a mediocre leader.

So the turmoil in the Islamic Republic is interesting in a different way. As Shadi Hamid noted in a provocative essay for First Things, the various Islamic movements of the Muslim world anticipated the latest Western fascination (and fear) with “post-liberal” politics, offering non-Western attempts to forge a political-cultural system that could declare itself a successor to secular liberalism, not just a return to the past.

So its mixture of failure, defeat and, in the Iranian case, corruption and stagnation, is a constant warning to Western thinkers trying to imagine something after liberalism.

These imaginings will continue because liberalism continues toward an unhappy fate – barren, fragmented, stagnant, dystopian. All the optimistic bravado about the Ukraine War inspiring a broader liberal renaissance hasn’t changed that reality.

But in Moscow, in Beijing, in Iran, we can see other avenues available, and they all quickly descend into darkness.