International relations scholars tend to divide history into epochs defined by the distribution of power. The multipolarity of the 20th-century interwar period created an order in which geopolitical might ostensibly made right. The bipolarity of the Cold War era led to a bifurcated structure of economic blocs and security pacts. Washington’s “unipolar moment” following the Cold War midwifed a liberal international order based on open markets, democracy promotion and international institutions.
The death of the post-Cold War era has been proclaimed many times now, only for those reports to have been greatly exaggerated. After the 2008 global financial crisis, many observers declared the end of neoliberalism, which had underpinned the post-Cold War global order—but it persisted. Similar predictions were made after the populist shocks of 2016, and yet the global order remained largely unchanged. Even the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic failed to change things all that much.
What makes 2025 interesting is that for the first time, both critics and supporters of the liberal international order seem ready to deliver its eulogy. For example, it’s no surprise that Jamieson Greer, the current U.S. trade representative under President Donald Trump, would characterize the neoliberal order as “untenable and unsustainable.” Lauding what he dubbed the “Turnberry system”—after Trump’s golf resort in Turnberry, Scotland—based on high tariffs and macroeconomic rebalancing, Greer bragged, “What was long dismissed as heresy by the free-trade fundamentalists in Brussels, Geneva and Washington is now becoming conventional wisdom.”
