The Campaign Update: How's That 'Liberal World Order' Working Out For You?
White House Economic Advisor Brian Deese created a stir over the weekend when he told a CNN interviewer that the program of major sanctions enacted by the U.S. and Europe in response to Vladimir Putin’s ongoing war on Ukraine is “…about the future of the liberal world order and we have to stand firm.”
Naturally, the use of the phrase “Liberal World Order” created confusion and consternation among many Americans, some of whom understand what Deese means by using that language, and most of whom do not. The latter group includes the CNN talking head, who just zoomed on past Deese’s statement without asking for clarification.
It also includes Newsweek, which said this about the remark:
While the phrase "new world order" is generally used to denote a significant geopolitical change, it can also designate a conspiracy theory that stipulates a secretive globalist authority is seeking to control the world under a totalitarian regime and strip sovereign countries and its citizens of their freedom.
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But that is not what Deese was referring to at all. What he was actually talking about goes all the way back to the post-WWII Marshall Plan and America’s commitment then to use its massive Navy - at the time several times larger than all the other navies of the world combined - and other armed forces to project power and become the world’s policeman in exchange for the nations of Europe demilitarizing and surrendering their various international empires.
At the end of WWII, most of Europe and much of Asia were in complete shambles. America was unarguably in a position in which it could have easily established its own global empire, but chose not to do that overtly via force because the Truman government knew the U.S. population was weary of war and would not support it. Instead, Truman and his advisors, working in concert with the governments of Western Europe, chose to establish what critics have claimed was a de facto global empire under the guise of keeping the peace and helping to rebuild Europe and Japan.
Instead of invading the newly-expanded Soviet Union and deposing Stalin and his Marxist thugs, as General George Patton urged Truman to authorize him to do, America stationed tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel and artillery along the communist empire’s western flank, thus establishing the military defense pact that in 1949 evolved into NATO. America also left thousands of personnel and equipment in places like Japan and South Korea and North Africa and the Middle East, establishing Naval outposts and airports to facilitate an Air Force presence.