In 1935, George Dangerfield published his (in)famous book: The Strange Death of Liberal England. The book concerned itself with the apparently abrupt demise of the Liberal party; prior to the First World War one of the two main governing parties of the UK, yet after it in a terminal decline and surpassed by the new emerging Labour party. Dangerfield placed the blame on the fights that the Liberal party had picked with its Conservative opponents; over Irish home rule and the 1911 Parliament Act (in effect the status of the House of Lords), while simultaneously being outflanked on the left by suffragism and the trade union movement. His thesis has been picked apart over the years, but whatever the merits of the book, he was putting his finger on something profound, a seismic shift in British constitutional affairs. Yesterday saw something just as profound; the strange death of Liberal Interventionism, with the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, amid an orgy of finger pointing.
Liberal Interventionism was based around the idea that liberal democracies should try to make the world a better place by stepping in to defend citizens of other lands from domestic tyranny and the consequences of failed states. It's sometimes argued that as a concept it went back to US president Woodrow Wilson and his Fourteen Points that emerged from the carnage of the First World War, alongside his call to "make the world safe for democracy", but it would be just as easy to draw a line straight back to the Liberal party itself - Gladstone's calls for humanitarian intervention in Bulgaria following atrocities in the war of 1875-8 struggled for mastery in Victorian England against Disraeli and Salisbury's realpolitik and fears of Russian expansionism. Earlier than that, British military (mainly naval) might was used to end the slave trade (albeit after many decades of having profited handsomely from it).
While the United States could hardly have been said to enter the Second World War due to Liberal Interventionism, its attempt to engage in 'nation building' in the shattered ruins of Germany and Japan after the war, and its creation of the United Nations - a second attempt after the failure of Wilson's League of Nations - to try and form a rules-bound framework for international affairs heavily biased towards the US and its (mostly) democratic allies certainly were. But the second half of the 20th century was obscured by the battle against communism, and a series of decidedly Illiberal Interventions in countries like Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, and support for equally unsavoury regimes in Argentina and Paraguay, which were much more about traditional great power politics.
It was only with the fall of communism and an end to anti-communist interventions (some of them disastrous, like Vietnam) that Liberal Interventionism really got its second wind. President Clinton in the United States and Tony Blair in the UK presided over a series of international Liberal Interventions, beginning in Somalia in 1992-5, Cambodia (1992-3) and Bosnia (1992-6), and then progressing through Haiti (1994), Kosovo (1999) and Sierra Leone (2000). While success was mixed at best in Somalia, the spectacle of US troops dragged through the streets after the Battle of Mogadishu leading Clinton to approve a hasty exit, the apparent success of each subsequent intervention paved the way for the next. It even led the American right, usually by inclination isolationist, to come up with its own variant on Liberal Interventionism, via the Project for the New American Century, which dreamed of a muscular neocolonialism, toppling pro-western dominos across the globe to secure what was still unironically referred to as a New World Order, a new Pax Americana.
If 2000 marked the apotheosis of Liberal Interventionism, then 2001 would begin its downfall. The Bush administration's (over-)reaction to the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington was repression at home and military adventurism abroad. Afghanistan was apparently won quickly, using the Northern Alliance as ground troops backed up by B-52 strikes. Emboldened, neoconservatives in the Bush government organised a sequel two years later in Iraq, and dreamed of rolling the tide onwards, perhaps to Tehran and beyond. But Iraq proved to be a bridge too far. The power vacuum left by the removal of the Ba'ath regime allowed first Iranian-backed militias to take the south, and then the terrifying fundamentalist state of ISIL to emerge in the north and west, spilling over into Syria and destabilising that state. The 2010-11 Arab Spring that seemed at first to be the neocon dream finally emerging was nipped in the bud in places like Egypt, and after a final Liberal Intervention in Libya went sour and degenerated into armed warlords battling for major cities, the West backed away from Syria and left it to the Russians and Turks.
The US is still deployed in Iraq, and after much blood, money and many setbacks has belatedly managed to scrape together some semblance of a functioning state, albeit with the Kurdish north in a de facto independence. But Afghanistan has been the conflict that has exposed most cruelly the limits to 'nation building'. The Taliban, aided and abeted by Pakistan and occasionally others, has emerged stronger than ever from 20 years of insurgency, while the US withdrawal, negotiated by president Trump but followed through by Biden, has exposed the house of cards that 20 years of corruption, warlordism and mismanagement had built. The collapse of the central government was so fast because Afghanistan never had a central government, just a collection of regional tribal warlords who paid lip service to the government in Kabul for as long as US dollars were flowing. Afghanistan has been the graveyard of imperial ambitions for the British and Russians in the past, and has proved the same for the United States today. Not that it will necessarily be plain sailing for the Taliban either; they are enmeshed in Pashtun society, but Pashtuns only represent 45% of the country, and there will be resistance from Tajiks and Uzbeks in the north, just as there was in 2001, and Iranian-backed Tamurs in the west.
Still, I think Afghanistan marks the end of Liberal Interventionism, certainly for now. There has been no attempt to corral even 'coalitions of the willing' into Yemen, Tigray or South Sudan, let alone Syria. France has a presence in Mali to fight Al Qaeda afiliates, but president Macron is scaling that back and there is no pretence at 'nation building' any more. The world has become more complex, with the re-emergence of global powers, mainly China, but Russia has punched above its weight via leveraging the internet and deniable guerilla operations, and India is also beginning to flex its muscles on the international stage.
If the Strange Death of the British Liberal Party was as a result of picking fights it lost while being outflanked by new forces rising in the country, then perhaps the Strange Death of Liberal Interventionism is a similar story; picking fights in Iraq and Afghanistan that could not be won, while China and other major powers change the dynamics of geopolitics. I once told a disbelieving friend that future history books would date the decline of the post-WWII western hegemony to the financial crisis of 2008-9. I still believe that to an extent, though I admit I had underestimated the effect of China's demographic time bomb - resulting from the One Child policy - on dramatically slowing its seemingly inexorable rise. I wonder now if they might instead point to the inglorious retreat from Afghanistan as the final nail in its coffin.
