by Michael Lee
Academics are fond of evading the cyclical tendencies of history with clever aphorisms about how history “rhymes” or parodies itself. Nobody wants to assert the presence of deterministic forces of history, yet we would be unwise to fully reject them. As of 2025 we appear to be heading full steam into dark times. Not only is the United States in rapid, secular decline vis-à-vis China and its authoritarian allies, the liberal world order is crumbling.
This is not just a story of waning hegemony, or defection by other states, but of democratic backsliding in the heart of the liberal world, most notably in the United States itself. Liberal scholars of every stripe must brace themselves because they are entering an environment in which the very survival of liberalism is in doubt. In this short essay, I will draw upon the leadership long cycle vision of history, which understands the past millennium as being characterized by a pattern by which one state establishes a technological and economic lead over others, develops global power projection capabilities, and then exercises a degree of geopolitical leadership. I will employ the model to help explain where we are, what we might expect, and finally will propose a pathway to preserve the liberal succession through dark times.
Seapower and liberalism in history
The prevailing historical scripts in international relations do not always do a good job of revealing the cyclical tendencies of history, nor of appropriate analogies. States are not interchangeable billiard balls instead of actors inside complex networks. Moreover, authoritarianism is diverse and variegated. Far too often, scholarship about “democratic advantage” has been moored in a notion that authoritarian states resemble the Soviet Union. But the reality is that actors inside authoritarian states have many ways to exert influence in a world of complex interdependence as well.
As we contemplate the collapse of the liberal world order, liberals would be wise to ask: how can liberalism survive? Some would tell us that liberal survival is best guaranteed by a liberal leviathan. For instance, Ikenberry has argued that a liberal American hegemon could uphold a benign liberal world order that might end the cycle of violent power transitions (much as democratic institutions have tended to facilitate smoother transitions of power than authoritarian ones). His argument stresses that a rising China will not surpass the liberal world together, and moreover, that China would not overthrow the rules that enabled it to rise in the first place. I submit that a different historical script can offer us both a more accurate picture of what is happening today, and a clearer set of remedies.
There is a fundamental dichotomy between great powers rooted in geopolitical orientation. Most great powers have been oriented toward territorial control and land-based power. A few, however, have been oriented toward a different strategy rooted in command of the global commons. For most of human history, the seas have been the primary arteries of global trade and commerce. Possession of power projection capabilities (i.e. the ability to exert force over distance) have tended to be highly concentrated, enabling a single state to exert control over the vital arteries of trade, and thus, to influence world politics.
The leadership long cycle model offers an account of how sea powers have evolved historically since at least 900 CE. At particular moments in history, new technologies have emerged and revolutionized the economy. In those moments, leadership in a particular leading sector has often been vital, leading to rapid productivity growth and positive spillover effects not enjoyed by others. Combined with control over key sea routes, these mechanisms have often enabled a single power to leap ahead of others economically. Wealthier, and more advanced than others, this leader has strong incentives to develop the naval (and later air) capabilities necessary to defend far-flung trading interests.
Such great powers have historically built global institutions that others had to adhere to, lest they be cut off from the global commons. According to the leadership long-cycle model, there is a succession of global leaders (not hegemons) from Sung China to the United States that has followed this path.1 Even if they are weaker in some respects than large land powers, sea powers have often been able to contain continental rivals, while exerting greater influence in distant lands. For instance, the Dutch Republic and British Empire contained France and later Germany, while building vast colonial empires.
Over time, however, the advantages that enabled global leadership to diffuse to others, while tempting territorial traps grab the attention of waning leaders. Sea powers have historically been liberal and cosmopolitan (in the metropole) in the context of their times, as they must be: social openness is an impetus to innovation; while openness to trade and finance are important amplifiers of the wealth and structural power of seapowers. Land powers2 (e.g. the Mongol Empire, Hapsburg Spain, Bourbon France, Napoleonic France, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union), on the other hand, rely on the extraction of wealth from territories under their demesne. They derive power not from dynamism but from bulk. Martial threats from land-based empires and territorial traps have seen global leaders turn away from the institutions that nurtured them in their rise. For instance, the threat of Bourbon France, the Netherlands abandoned the “true freedom republic” of Johan De Witt; Britain found itself drawn into endless imperial wars (the Mutiny of 1857, the Boer War); while the 21st century United States found itself bogged down in an endless war on terrorism, followed by a burst of right-wing populism. At times, cultural appeals from land powers may also threaten the basis of sea power societies. For instance, as England sought to establish parliamentary institutions, it was ruled by a monarchy that yearned for the kind of absolutism they saw on the continent. Confederate diplomacy during the Civil War saw the South make appeals to conservative elites (and even the Pope), rooted in the idea that preserving a hierarchical society would serve their ideological goals. Land powers are naturally jealous of the powers and privileges enjoyed by their seafaring rivals, and no doubt tempted by the seeming ease of conquest. Many of the bloodiest wars in human history (e.g. the Italian Wars, the internationalized Dutch Rebellion, the War of the League of Augsburg, War of Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars, and the World Wars) have been about just that: destructive conflicts about who would lead the system.
Seapowers have historically punched far above their weight by taking advantage of a few different mechanisms. First, seapowers have an inherent edge over their land power rivals in that seapower is less threatening to the sovereignty of other great powers. Seapowers do not rely on territorial control in order to gain wealth and power (indeed, overstretch tends to be the thing that does them in), reducing the menace to their neighbors. Seapowers must also be inviting because the attraction of their ports, financial centers, or currencies all depends on the fact that many others use or accept it. Second, many of the sources of seapower strength are mobile – people, goods, and capital can move, and the networks they form can be reformed around a new center. A critical element of power transition in world history has been the way that the outgoing global leader has paved the way for its successor. Even territorial conquest or absorption by land powers can fail to integrate these dynamic sources of power. For instance, when King Sebastian of Portugal’s death (during his failed invasion of Morocco) saw Portugal absorbed by the Hapsburg monarchy, their key trading center in Antwerp was part of a rebellion against Hapsburg rule. Even as the Hapsburgs recaptured the city, it was ultimately supplanted by Amsterdam as the key center for trade with the far east. In England, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 saw the rejection of James II, in favor of Mary II and her husband, the Dutch King William. William was joined, however, by a significant flow of Dutch capital that, in time, established England as the premier financial and commercial power. In Winston Churchill’s “never surrender” speech, he was open about his desire for the “new world with all of its power and might” to “come to the rescue of the old.” Churchill facilitated this directly by giving away bases in exchange for ships. From Churchill’s genealogy (he was the son of an American socialite who married into an august British family) to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s non-rhotic transatlantic accent, we see many examples of a road hewn for an Anglo-American power transition.
To summarize, the leadership long-cycle offers us some key insights for how history has proceeded in the past millennium. Typically, a single state has leapt ahead technologically, used their lead to establish peerless power projection capabilities, and, in turn, has engaged in order building. As sea powers, system leaders have typically been liberal relative to their peers and their historical contexts (though this has been much truer at the metropole). When they have declined, the global order has often fallen apart, with leadership contested by different contenders, including some of the most destructive wars in human history. However, seapowers have often emerged as the winners of these conflicts, in part by maintaining peaceful successions from the incumbent system leader to the next one.
Where are we now?
We are entering a profoundly dangerous period of global history. China has emerged as a peer competitor or leader in many of the high-tech industries of the 21st century – from the strong performance of DeepSeek (despite protectionist measures imposed by the CHIPS act) to China’s mastery of green energy production.3 Chinese GDP already exceeds that of the US in purchasing power parity terms, and China continues to outpace the US in real per capita growth, despite some demographic headwinds. China has only begun to transform its economic heft into military power but has the advantage of being able to target areas of vital interest and to adapt to changing technological circumstances. While Ukraine’s destruction of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet with a relatively inexpensive missile, was a victory for a US ally, it also signaled the immense vulnerability of American carrier groups and other assets to devastating attacks. By focusing its efforts on the most vital sectors of military conflict,4 while ignoring legacy capabilities (e.g. long-range strategic bombers), and avoiding the territorial traps that the United States cannot seem to resist, China poses a meaningful challenge to American hegemony.
It can be useful to think as well about the ways that geopolitical constraints (and even the political shifts that occur at the height of a world order) can nurture a domestic politics incapable of responding to challenges. Domestically, a strong and open civil society is the sine qua non of liberal democracy. This can be why it is precisely in those eras most defined by rapid economic and social progress, that anti-democratic backlash mounts. Social and economic change threaten existing hierarchies, as Huntingdon so ably argues, and as we see in the similarities of our own era with the Belle Epoque of the late 19th century. As a waning Britain and France faced the geopolitical threat of Wilhelmine Germany, they too contended with domestic polities that were difficult to tame. In Britain, issues like the Irish question saw Joseph Chamberlain and his Liberal Unionists form a new party aligned with the Conservatives. New issues, such as a proposed income tax, radicalized British elites, who pressed the Conservative Party to embrace increasingly anti-democratic language, as well as protectionism as an alternative to income taxation. The threat from Labour, on the other hand, was gradually devouring the political basis of the Liberals, who at times turned to dubious groups to remain electorally viable. In France, the inter-elite politics necessary to create the entente sometimes opened up new channels for the diffusion of old hatreds. Russo-French mingling at the élite level helped propagate anti-semitic ideas (which had long existed in France). Simultaneously, a revanchist desire to reclaim Alsace-Lorraine and reverse the humiliation of 1870 created an enlarged space for the military in French society coupled with yearning for a “man on horseback” (e.g. consider the Boulanger coup d’état). When Albert Dreyfus was wrongfully accused of providing secrets to the German military, his case divided French society despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence because it involved the political issues upon which many French elites were politically reliant.
Likewise, the United States has proven entirely unable to adapt to the geopolitical challenge posed by China, with a series of responses more akin to Blockbuster’s lackadaisical response to the challenge of Netflix in the early 2000s. The areas where American strength remains most intact are those connected to structural power – American centrality in global financial networks, prestigious universities, flows of information, etc. remain in place. However, the American geopolitical turn has placed much of this in doubt. Protectionist forays undertaken under Biden and in Trump’s first term have not slowed China’s rise. Trump’s declaration of “liberation day” tariffs on April 2nd, 2025, sought to raise tariffs to levels not seen since before the Great Depression. Yet contrary to the magical thinking of the administration, whose “User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System” did not envision retaliation, even Japan began to dump American treasuries in response to Trump’s actions.
Simultaneously, attacks on immigrants and universities threaten the core of American dynamism: with only 5% of world population, the United States needs immigration in order to remain at the forefront of global innovation. Finally, attacks on the rule of law (firing inspectors, flaunting court rulings, gutting the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act), and Trump-led business ventures that allow foreign governments to curry favor with the president directly (e.g. Trump’s memecoin, World Liberty Financial) and undermine the institutional basis of American centrality in the global economy: there is substantial political risk to doing business in a country without rule of law. In short, the actions of Trump and other right-wing populist leaders do not only threaten liberalism domestically, they also undermine the geopolitical conditions and relationships among liberal states that have facilitated the rise of the liberal world order.
Lastly, the institutions that were meant to backstop a world “after hegemony” have proven to be fair-weather friends. Trump violated the USMCA that he himself had negotiated in his first term without hesitation. American failure to appoint appellate judges to the WTO has created a backlog in that institution. Trump frequently casts doubt on his commitment to NATO and has also withdrawn from the World Health Organization. The collapse of the liberal world order today illustrates the hollowness of any notion that a “liberal leviathan” could preserve freedom globally or even domestically. Ikenberry’s vision entailed the idea that the victors of a major war could take advantage of their temporary moment of primacy to establish fair rules (in his view, a global constitutional order) that would sustain them later, even as they grew weaker.
Rising challengers would not try to upset the world order because they would not wish to overthrow the rules that sustained their rise, and even if they did, challenging the order would mean facing a united front of states committed to the prevailing rules of the game. Ikenberry failed to consider many factors in his analysis. First, the liberal rules of the game are not fair from the standpoint of the many authoritarian states that make up the international system. For instance, complaints about sanctions in response to human rights violations abound. Nor is there any reason to expect that a state would necessarily want to maintain the rules that allowed it to rise, since there will always be superior alternatives. Why opt for fair rules when you can instead opt for unfair ones that benefit you personally?
But more importantly, Ikenberry failed to understand the ways in which orders also transform the states that built them. American hegemony involved a substantial transformation of American society, sometimes in ways that undermined the domestic basis of liberal democracy. This was clearest during the war on terror, which saw the United States drawn into land wars in the Middle East, increasingly fiscally constrained by military and other spending, with American political unity increasingly reliant on the invocation of ethnic scapegoating.
The way forward
Liberals must foster the kind of organic social, economic, ideational transnational connections that can lay the foundations for a succession to a new liberal order. Many great liberal projects have run aground because of the failure to do so. Consider, for instance, the great enthusiasm for world federalism in the 1940s, and the equal failure of that enthusiasm to draw support from newly decolonizing countries in the developing world.5 I propose that the best place to start is rooted in a most basic desire: a common interest in survival. A global, transnational seapower strategy offers a useful way to accomplish this in a dangerous world without a liberal hegemon. Critically, security is a public good that none of these states could adequately construct on their own, but rather, is one they can construct together as part of a polycentric governance structure.
I do not believe in “state of nature” experiments – we need to start with the world we have. The most important building block of that world are the remnants of the liberal world order (without the United States), which represent considerable capabilities. The European Union, Britain, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand should form a mutual defense pact, hereafter called the Liberal Union.6 Such countries represent about a quarter of world GDP, two nuclear powers, and 24 percent of global military spending, more than any state other than the United States (and double that of China). However, their capabilities are currently allocated in very inefficient ways – instead of one powerful military, the European Union has dozens of weak ones serving parochial goals.
The consolidation of EU defense policy would form the most important piece of the Liberal Union. Members would be expected to pledge to mutual defense and to contribute to the establishment of some common force to serve the transnational alliance.7 Arrangements would have to be made to enable the union to speak with one voice in order to credibly deter attacks (especially in early years where nuclear deterrence might be particularly important). Acting collectively would have many advantages. There are economies of scale to military production, especially for technologically intensive platforms (e.g. aircraft and spacecraft).
Shifting away from US-based military technologies, while involving transitional costs, would also deprive the United States of the kind of scale economies it earns by producing military equipment for itself and for its allies. Similarly, American hegemony is being financially underwritten by the fact that foreigners readily hold US treasuries as a safe store of value. The creation of a Eurobond market would transfer some portion of America’s exorbitant privilege to the EU. Simultaneously, openness to immigration and the preservation of core liberties inside the Liberal Union could attract skilled immigrants, and provide the dynamic basis for innovation. The economic size of the major centers of the Liberal Union – Tokyo, Paris, London, and perhaps one day Singapore and Rio de Janeiro, in turn, could provide the basis for major tech hubs and global champions.
A strong focus on seapower, airpower, and space power, over the construction of massive land armies would not only be advantageous in that such a union would be able to spread globally. A modern seapower state would be less threatening to others, because it would not entail the construction of capabilities useful for territorial conflict. The obvious candidates for expansion would be other important states with dangerous neighbors. India, Latin America, ASEAN, and democratic African states would be the obvious next candidates to attract into the union. Access to markets and finance would represent substantial motivations. But more important than that would be the organic linkages such financial interactions would create between the global south and the liberal world. Critically, we should avoid the kinds of exploitative interactions that have often characterized north-south relations. Contrast the benevolence of the American Marshall Plan aid to the universally reviled technocratic approach of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (to say nothing of the even worse imperial past).
And what of America? The longer the remnants of the liberal world order pander to the whims of a post-democratic America, the more they reinforce America’s authoritarian transition (while allowing themselves to be cajoled piece-meal). The loss of military scale economies, access to bases abroad, exorbitant privilege, and the other benefits that the United States presently enjoys will force societal adjustments. Such costs will strengthen the arguments of those Americans who seek to return to liberal democracy, and they will mitigate the damage that an authoritarian America can do in the world. Deprived of the ability to borrow unlimited sums of money, a rapidly aging United States would be much less able to project power globally.
Conclusion
In short, we have been here before: hegemonic decline, crisis, and war. But liberalism has also survived these cycles before, in part through the explicit embrace of succession planning. Liberals of all stripes must be serious about how liberalism can survive a world without American hegemony. Constructing the beginnings of a polycentric structure that can allow the capabilities of many small liberal states (or even substates) to coalesce, to scale upwards, and to generate structural power represents the most viable plan to create a geopolitical force that can preserve global democracy without falling into territorial traps or dangerous imperialism. Of course, achieving such a goal is easier said than done. Will liberal states unite in time? Can differences in north-south perspectives be overcome?
NOTES
- The succession goes from Sung China, Venice, Genoa, Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. Notably, those powers from Venice to Portugal exercised much more limited power than the others. ↩︎
- Note that these are ideal types, and that many states include conflicting factional interests. For instance, naval construction by Colbert in Louis XIV’s France or Kaiser Wilhelm in Wilhelmine Germany represented a departure from a strictly land-oriented position. ↩︎
- For instance, China represents 74% of global exports of assembled solar panels (United Nations 2024). China also represents 34% of knowledge and technology-intensive manufacturing value-added (versus 20% for the United States) (National Science Foundation 2024: 23). ↩︎
- For instance, China roughly matches the United States in military satellites deployed (Union of Concerned Scientists 2025). ↩︎
- Jenkins, Robert. 2022. United States of the World: American Activism for Global Government at the Dawn of Decolonization, unpublished manuscript. ↩︎
- The institutional obstacles to even accomplishing this much are substantial, and for brevity I leave a deeper exploration to others. My aim here is simply to work backwards from the most plausible path to liberal survival. ↩︎
- Though at times structures with even less explicit leadership have been able to keep the peace. See, for instance, Deudney’s (1995) exploration of the American states system as a structure of international relations, or Acharya and Pardesi (2025) on the Indian Ocean system. ↩︎
Michael Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at CUNY-Hunter College. Send him mail.
Isonomia Quarterly 