The Liberal International Order and the Transatlantic Security Community

• In Event: Retrenchment from the Global Order? US Foreign Policy Under Trump and Beyond

Abstract

In 1995, Risse published a book on Cooperation Among Democracies. The European Influ-ence on U.S. Foreign Policy. The book argued that the US-European security community has constituted the transatlantic core of the Liberal International Order (LIO) throughout the Cold War and beyond. More than twenty-five years later, the LIO is being challenged not only by external powers, such as China and Russia, but from within the liberal core. The Trump admin-istration signified a continuation “on steroids” of a gradual retreat by the US from global leader-ship in the LIO that started after 2003 Iraq war. Europe and the EU so far have been unable to exercise leadership beyond the European borders. The paper explores the crisis of the LIO as a major challenge to the transatlantic security community as well as the prospects of renewed transatlantic cooperation among democracies to respond to these challenges.

Authors

• Tanja A. Boerzel, Freie Universität Berlin

• Thomas Risse, Freie Universität Berlin