A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order

Abstract

This book emerged from lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in November 2016, just days after the election of Donald J. Trump to the U.S. presidency. G. John Ikenberry, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University addressed an anxious audience concerned about the crisis of liberal internationalism that the election (and Brexit, a few months earlier) had portended. A World Safe for Democracy is both a defense of liberal internationalism and a reevaluation of its history. Although liberal internationalism is often presented as a confident crusade to remake the world in America's image, Ikenberry argues that it is best understood as a defensive strategy to create a world order that made possible the survival of democracies. It was a project rooted in the Enlightenment and developed as an ideology in the nineteenth century. Woodrow Wilson was the first to try to implement it internationally after World...