To winners, indeed, go spoils. And when the Cold War ended – when fascism and communism were finally rejected and the world sought to forever avoid the horrors it had collectively experienced through two World Wars and 45 years of frozen détente – the winner was clear: Liberal democracy, led in spirit and action by the United States.

If the winner was clear, so were the spoils: A new international order based on Western economic principles, Western values, and Western military expansion – all packaged neatly as globalization, including:

• The promotion of transparency and freedom.
• A rejection of zero-sum analysis, promoting instead a rules-based order built on values of free trade, human rights, and cooperation among states.
• The image (and at times reality) of global governance through global institutions such as NATO, the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank that seek to further the order’s mission.

This new world order represented, as political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously noted in 1989, “the end of history… and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government.” The post-Cold War United States wielded an unprecedented amount of power and stood ready to dominate the newly unilateral world.

But as they say in sports, that’s why they play the game; it’s funny how history plays out when it actually plays out. The world of 2017 is far different than the one imagined in the 1990’s.

Today, populist movements have gained power and influence across Western societies. In fact, it’s a mutated form of populism – co-mingled with nativism and nationalism – that has risen in Western nations like Britain, Germany, Poland, Austria, France, and of course, the U.S.

For the first time in 25 years, the liberal world order is under direct threat.

The question becomes: What went wrong and can anything be done – or is it too late?

What Went Wrong

Populism doesn’t rise out of nowhere. The opportunity to disrupt and potentially dismantle an existing world order requires a door through which to enter. In fact, today’s populism found two doors: Technology and Inequality.

Technology allowed globalization to move at hyper speed. Markets instantly connected. Western values pushed via data packets to the world’s far reaches. Weaponry and military might dehumanized, shifting to allegedly-precision missiles and mechanical drones.

Technology certainly democratizes opportunity and access. But it also highlighted a growing global concern: Inequality. Like a 24/7, real-time, Wi-Fi-enabled thumbing of the nose, the Internet helps anyone see what one doesn’t have.

Like so many ills throughout history, inequality grew slowly before it grew quickly. To be clear, inequality isn’t necessarily destabilizing; it can exist when the economic pie is growing. But with the 2008 global economic crisis, that pie stopped growing.

To aggravate the issue, the same people suffering growing economic inequality also suffered militaristic inequality. Internationally, fighting and civilian deaths centered in some parts of the world, but not others; domestically, the fighting and dying were done by distinct parts of the U.S. population, but not others. Increasingly, inequality represented an economic and militaristic double whammy.

As the inequality problem metastasized, people needed someone to blame. Ethnicity and race-based concerns grew on the far right; class concerns evolved on far left. Regardless, both sides agree: There’s a problem with the system.

The Weaponization of Echo Chambers

And yet, while globalization’s growing inequality offered the opportunity for populism’s rise, opportunity does not equal effect. That opportunity needed to be weaponized.

Media (and political discourse) was one of the first casualties in this new world. Gone are the days of high fixed costs to produce newspapers or television. Servers and websites require cheap initial investments – allowing for a greater range of views. The economics of this change can be best understood using Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory, which states, “Previous incumbents… lose value in favor of aggregators who aggregate modularized suppliers — which they don’t pay for — to consumers/users with whom they have an exclusive relationship at scale.” (https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/) The power shift has gone from those who can provide supply, where space was a constraint, to those who can aggregate demand. In other words, power is no longer with those who can create the supply for the existent demand. Instead, power belongs to those who create the demand and have an “exclusive relationship” with, in this case, the media consumer or reader.

Welcome to the echo chambers, safe spaces comprised of individuals with similar thoughts and beliefs (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2017-08-15/false-prophecy-hyperconnection).

Steve Bannon referred to Breitbart as the “platform of the alt-right.” Populist ideas have appeared dormant for decades, but that today’s ability to connect fringe individuals in a network has helped unify their voice and legitimize their views – after all these “fringe individuals” are citizens with the power to vote and influence policy.

Today’s Populism

Today’s far-right populism is simultaneously very different and very similar to 20^th Century nativism. The similarity stems from the creation of a distinct “out group” or “other” that has come to fruition in countless civilizations along the lines of Samuel Huntington’s definition that “A civilization is… the broadest level of cultural identity people have…It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people.” (Clash of Civilizations, Foreign Affairs, 1993) Yet, globalization has made the world a smaller place and not only increased interaction between cultures but also made it essential (especially for Westerners) to respect other modern thought culturally different civilizations. This has exacerbated underlying insecurities, “interactions intensify civilization consciousness and awareness of differences between… and commonalities within civilizations… that… invigorates differences and animosities stretching… back deep into history.” (Clash of Civilizations, Foreign Affairs, 1993) While globalization may be a unique cause, these feelings of cultural differences have existed for millennia.

Adding to the uniqueness of today’s modern populist movement is its ideology – one that runs counter to the ideals of the liberal order. Within the United States the alt-right has sought to reject established Washington Consensus by advocating against, “capitalism, Christianity, and support for the United States’ international hegemony.” (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/2017-10-27/european-roots-alt-right) Instead, this movement seeks a grand U.S. retrenchment from the global stage, which would effectively end assurances of free trade and lead to the return great power politics within the world’s different regions. This is the clearest threat to the current international order.

European populist movements have different policy prescriptions than U.S. populism, but are equally disruptive to the international order. Europe’s populist rise reflects the changing balance of power within Europe and disillusionment of the former Western model. Terrorism and the Syrian refugee crisis have exacerbated insecurities there. This reflects “Europe’s demographic trajectory, which points toward a steadily declining white share of the population throughout the twenty-first century” (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/2017-10-27/european-roots-alt-right) meaning “Europeans do not have time to wait… practical politics must begin today.”( https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/2017-10-27/european-roots-alt-right) For example, Poland’s Law and Justice party has incubated ethno nationalist sentiment.

What Must Be Done

The current international order is under siege. It is being undermined by external, revisionist forces such as China and Russia that seek to dethrone the U.S. at the top of the international order, as well as by internal populist revolts that view the current order with disdain. Any solution to preserve the international order must sufficiently deal with both threats.

Indeed, to save itself, the international order must simultaneously reaffirm and reinvent itself.

A reaffirmation of sovereignty as the bedrock of the international system is vital to any larger, more comprehensive reforms to solve the external threat. The role of sovereignty has been greatly diminished in the post-war era, as Super Powers sought to divide the world in two during the Cold War. The Responsibility to Protect Doctrine is now viewed skeptically after being used to justify regime change in Libya and Russia’s citation of R2P in Ukraine. Most recently sovereignty violations have occurred of cyber weapons and misinformation campaigns.

The dismissal of sovereignty by Great Powers may work towards short term interests but undermines trust and, consequently, harms both long term interests and international stability. The United States must be particularly careful. The international community looks to America to determine precedent; its actions have an outsized role in determining future actions. The U.S. cannot exclude itself from this pillar if it seeks progress towards greater international reform and cooperation. Without sovereignty as a bedrock, states and regimes will be fearful and less trusting of cooperation.

The reinvention must occur internally. Here, Western nations must come to terms with their new role in a new world. The Soviet Union collapse did not usher in an indefinite era of liberal democracies. Rather, Western nations must understand their economic and military weight no longer dictates the terms of the world. Different countries and cultures modernized and wield vast influence. Education reforms to teach non-Western values, as well as how discern fake from reliable news, are vital. Western societies must help citizens become educated – help them to want to become educated – about the benefits and responsibilities of belonging to a modern democracy.