Stacie Goddard, Wellesley College
The war in Gaza has passed its one year anniversary. Israel’s military operations, launched in retaliation for Hamas’s brutal attacks on October 7 and intended to eradicate that organization, have now claimed the lives of more than 40,000 Palestinians, most of whom are civilians. Half a million Palestinians face starvation. The World Bank estimates 18.5 billion dollars of critical infrastructure have been lost, most of which are homes.[1] Over one hundred thousand Israelis remained displaced in the country. The war has now expanded into Lebanon, where Israel hopes to weaken Hezbollah.
The organs of international law have weighed in on this war, with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling that Israel’s actions plausibly fit the definition of genocide and the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (as well as several Hamas leaders). Some argue that the ongoing conflict threatens the international order as well. U.S. support for Israel’s operations and defense of its ally against the ICJ and ICC, even as it flouts rules governing conduct of war, have fatally undercut the legitimacy of the “liberal international order” (LIO), the series of rules and norms that have guided international relations since at least the end of World War II.[2] In particular, scholars suggest that, while application of the order has always been problematic, the scale of U.S. hypocrisy in Gaza has irrevocably undermined the order’s legitimacy and, as a result, the U.S.’s position as a hegemon in world politics.[3]
This argument is plausible, but it raises a number of theoretical questions. Why and how does legitimacy matter to hegemony and international order (if it does at all)? Theoretical skeptics would argue that legitimacy has very little impact on order, and that U.S. hegemony rests more on its material power and interests in the region, rather than any commitment to abide by liberal rules and norms. Even for those who place greater weight on legitimacy, other questions arise: if legitimacy does matter, why does it matter now? This is certainly not that this is the first time that the U.S. has acted against its professed rules and norms. Why would hypocrisy bear costs now? Finally, if this is a moment of delegitimation, what does this mean for U.S. hegemony and the future of the LIO?
Legitimation and liberal international order
IR theorists diverge on their understanding of the so-called LIO. Institutionalists and constructivists argue that, during and after World War II, the United States designed and installed a relatively coherent, fundamentally liberal order.[4] Substantively, its institutions facilitated the free exchange of goods, currency, and capital across borders. They nurtured compatible domestic institutions that would protect private property and foreign investment, limit impediments to commerce, and root out corruption. The order was also substantively liberal in its aspiration to substitute human reason for power politics, by replacing international anarchy with global governance. In the resulting web of international legal regimes and regulatory agencies, technocrats and judges—not state representatives—made key decisions. Procedurally, the order is liberal, because it relies on rationalized rules and laws, as well as the consent of the govern, as the basis for rule. Through the order’s institutions the hegemonic United States wisely bound itself.[5] The order’s contributions to global welfare gave all a stake in its continued vitality, and America’s track record of generally playing by the rules rendered the order legitimate.[6]
This narrative of course has its critics. Realists charge that the liberal international order has been a self-serving, and often dangerous, myth. With respect to substance, the hegemonic U.S.’s commitment to a liberal foreign policy has always been thin, and the U.S. has been willing to violate its principles in pursuit of its interests. With respect to procedures, when the United States was not able to advance its interests through the consent of its international partners, it easily loosened its self-imposed bonds—turning to coercion, shopping in other forums, or simply going its own way. For others, even if there was some sort of liberal order, it was hardly “international,” but instead confined largely to the “Global West.” The colonial and then the post-colonial Global South, including Middle East, was largely if not entirely excluded.[7] The order’s claim to be “liberal” is “mere rhetoric,” concealing how the order served the private interests of the United States and its allies, not those of the global public.[8]
It may be true that the LIO is rhetorical, but that does not make it any less real. However problematic the LIO is in practice, the U.S. has legitimated its hegemony in the language of the liberal international order.[9] Leaders argued that the U.S. hegemonic order was legitimate because, while it was made possible by power, that power was being used to provide institutions that embodied universal, liberal values all rational individuals desired. Moreover, by pursuing those values through the creation of multilateral, legal institutions, the system rested not only on power, but on transparent and binding rules. From a legitimation perspective, to argue over whether U.S. leaders truly believed in these principles, or whether they consistently applied the order is less important than asking how the LIO has operated as a rhetorical instrument, one capable of mobilizing coalitions behind U.S. strategic aims in the Middle East and elsewhere, and demobilizing coalitions that would act against its interests.
While scholars in the realist and liberal/constructivist traditions disagree about the effects of norms and rules, they widely agree in how this process should be conceptualized. Rules and norms are given and static, and they determine what is considered legitimate and illegitimate behavior, such as the determination of what constitutes a war crime. Realists recognize this, but doubt that these norms have any effect: states avoid certain military strategies, not because they are illegitimate, but because they are ineffective. For liberals and constructivists, these norms socialize actors into legitimate behavior: states come to believe that certain actions constitute war crimes.
In the approach articulated in this essay and in our broader research program, we move from the idea that norms and rules are static and determinative of state behavior, to a position where norms manifest as rhetorical instruments to justify behavior. Legitimation works not through socialization, but through rhetorical persuasion and coercion.[10] In some cases, its appeals to liberal principles are designed to convince audiences at home and abroad to support U.S. policy. On the eve of the Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush addressed Congress, claiming that the United States must support “a new world order. America and the world must defend common vital interests — and we will. America and the world must support the rule of law — and we will.”[11] In others, the language of liberal rights is designed to silence opponents. For this reason, the LIO is always likely to be subject to rhetorical contestation, and the simple presence of contestation within an order is not surprising, nor is it necessarily a sign of an order’s decline.[12]
Audiences—especially other states with opposing interests—are unlikely to accept U.S. positions as a given. They will seek to deploy counterarguments that advance their own interests. At times, those arguments will be largely consistent with liberal principles, accepting the broad contours of the order, but arguing over second-order questions, such as the terms of its implementation. At other times, those counter-arguments might become order-challenging, rejecting liberal international principles entirely.[13]
Looking at the LIO through a legitimation lens suggests that hypocrisy is a feature, and not a bug, of the liberal international order. Because legitimation is used strategically, it is always a tool of interest. But this hypocrisy is not necessarily a problem to the maintenance of order. Indeed, as scholars argue, this hypocrisy can have a constraining effect, pulling the actions of the powerful back in line with liberal aspirations.[14] This then raises two theoretical questions. First, if hypocrisy can be constraining and reinforce the order why, in this moment in the Middle East, does it at least appear to be breaking the order apart? And second, is the geopolitical contestation surrounding this war order-consistent or order challenging?
Hypocrisy and the war in Gaza: the end of the “exception”
Hypocrisy has long dogged the LIO. There will always be tension between national interests and universal rules. And in the Middle East, as elsewhere, the U.S. has consistently acted in its interest, even when those interests collide with liberal principles and procedures. At times, leaders have justified their departures with appeals to higher-order principles. The U.S. may have flouted liberal institutions with its war in Iraq in 2003, but it claimed that it did so in order to promote democracy. At other times, leaders have simply remained silent about their hypocrisy. There has been little public comment, for example, on continued relations with Saudi Arabia despite its clear record of human rights violations.
Despite this, the U.S. seems to have largely escaped the costs of its hypocrisy in the Middle East. Both realists and rationalists might argue this is not surprising; rules and norms rarely constrain powerful states. A legitimation approach in contrast suggests that the U.S. has effectively justified its departure from liberal rules and norms in the Middle East through the language of “exception”: the U.S. has been justified in its violation of liberalism in the region, because it faces exceptional circumstances in dealing with the region’s unique challenges. An existing literature argues that liberalism can not only accept, but may even require, departures from normal rules in exceptional moments.[15] When faced with existential threats, be they despotic leaders seeking weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or terrorists in Syria, departures from liberal practices are warranted.
This is, of course, a problematic argument, one steeped in racialized discourse. Non-white groups are routinely constructed either as a threat to liberalism or as incapable of participating fully in liberal politics.[16] And this discourse of exceptional and existential threats — objective or otherwise — creates moments in which liberal actors can legitimate aggressive, sometimes even brutal, kinds of violence. What we are interested in here is that in Gaza this discourse of the exception seems to have faltered. This is not for a lack of trying. Israel has justified its operations against Hamas in the language of existential threat, and the U.S. has continued to legitimate its support of Israel as necessary to protect a democratic ally in the region.[17]
But the appealing to the exception may not be resonating for a few reasons. This discourse has run into a potent, and now globalized, counter-narrative, where Israel is cast into the role of a settler-colonial oppressor, and Palestinians as the indigenous oppressed. Hamas’s violence, if not justified, becomes comprehensible, and U.S. support for Israel’s campaigns complicit in imperialism. Critics of this discourse rightly point out that it often draws from disturbing anti-Semitic tropes and ignores the complexities of “indigeneity” in the Levant. The point here is not that the post-colonial narrative is objectively true; it is that it has effectively undercut the legitimation of the exceptional, and heightened charges of hypocrisy in the liberal order.
Moreover, the U.S. is in a situation where it is attempting to simultaneously legitimize its support for both Ukraine and Israel. Evidence suggests that these efforts raise significant questions about significant inconsistencies within the rules-based order. As Israel began its campaign in Gaza, one Middle Eastern official pointed to U.S. inconsistency, arguing that “If you describe cutting off water, food and electricity in Ukraine as a war crime, then you should say the same thing about Gaza.”[18] “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South,” said one senior G7 diplomat. “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”[19]
Counter-legitimation: South Africa, Russia, and China
Global rhetorical politics over the war in Gaza have undercut of the liberal international order as well. Today we see the rise of powerful counter-narrators, other great and middle powers that are using their position to challenge the legitimacy of the U.S.’s regional strategy. To be clear, not all rhetorical contestation is order challenging. Contestation, in fact, can reinforce the rules of the order, especially if this contestation is used to bring a wayward hegemon back in line with its own norms and principles. Moral criticism of the “Oil for Food” program after the Gulf War was designed not to undermine but to reinforce liberal humanitarian principles.[20]
Current counter-legitimation strategies vary in the extent to which they seek to reinforce, challenge, or perhaps even transform the liberal international order. South Africa’s efforts to bring charges of genocide against Israel to the International Court of Justice is an example of order-consistent contestation: while questioning the legitimacy of Israel’s actions—and those, like the U.S., that lend support—it is relying on institutional tools to press its claims. At the other end of the spectrum is Russia, deploying an order-challenging legitimation strategy. As Russia’s foreign minister complained, the order never had legitimacy: “The rules were never published, were never even announced by anyone to anyone, and they are being applied depending on what exactly the west needs at a particular moment of modern history.”[21]
China, in contrast, is pursuing a mixed strategy. On the one hand, China’s language positions itself as a peacemaker within the rules-based order. Shortly after October 7, China’s foreign ministry announced that “On the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, China has always been on the side of equity and justice. As a friend to both Israel and Palestine, what we hope to see is the two countries living together in peace and enjoying security and growth together.” Beijing brought together Hamas and Fatah to sign an agreement ending their “division and strengthening Palestinian unity,” an effort China’s leaders called necessary to securing a post-war peace. In general, then, Beijing has narrated its efforts as providing the necessary public goods that underpin collective security.
At the same time, China’s leaders represent their efforts as challenging the legitimacy of a liberal order that has perpetuated imperial and hierarchical relations among states. The Gaza conflict, the Global Times charged, is the result from “Western colonization and exacerbated by US biased Middle East policies.” As China’s representative to the Hague argued, any “struggle waged by peoples for their liberation, right to self-determination, including armed struggle against colonialism, occupation, aggression, domination against foreign forces” was legitimate and “should not be considered terror acts.” China’s use of anti-colonial rhetoric and its appeals to self-determination are aimed at two audiences. First, the Global South. For example, the December 2023 readout from the meetings of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs, references China’s efforts to shape a narrative that positions it as a leader of the Global South, noting that China was earning “greater moral appeal”, and that “on major issues concerning the future of humanity and the direction of the world, we must take a clear and firm position, hold the international moral high ground, and unite and rally the overwhelming majority in our world.”[22] Second, these appeals are designed to resonate with its domestic audience, by invoking the “century of humiliation” and stoking nationalist sentiment.
Conclusion
Do these politics of legitimation matter for the future of the U.S. hegemonic order? The war in Gaza continues, as does U.S. support, which is only likely to strengthen in the incoming administration. There has been little sign that Saudi Arabia or the U.A.E. intend to shift their quiet support of the U.S.; Iran matters more than U.S. hypocrisy. And even if legitimation of the LIO “matters,” it is not determinative: rhetorical politics interact with a number of different causal processes, including material power shifts in ways that make prediction impossible. Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe that legitimation failures in Gaza are accelerating cracks in the LIO. It has provided a foundation for counter-legitimation, and a movement towards the regionalization of orders. It increases charges of “whataboutism,” which scholars argue undermines both international and domestic support for U.S. foreign policy.[23] All of this suggests that while legitimation may not be determinative, it is a necessary component of mobilization behind an order.
References
Anievas, Alexander, and Shilliam, Robbie. 2015. Confronting the Global Colour Line; an introduction. In Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line, 1–16. Routledge.
Brown, Owen R. 2024. The Underside of Order: Race in the Constitution of International Order. International Organization 78 (1). Cambridge University Press: 38–66.
Búzás, Zoltán I. 2021. Racism and Antiracism in the Liberal International Order. International Organization 75 (2). Cambridge University Press: 440–463.
Chow, Wilfred M., and Dov H. Levin. 2024. The Diplomacy of Whataboutism and US Foreign Policy Attitudes. International Organization 78 (1). Cambridge University Press: 103–133.
Deitelhoff, Nicole, and Lisbeth Zimmermann. 2020. Things We Lost in the Fire: How Different Types of Contestation Affect the Robustness of International Norms. International Studies Review 22 (1). Oxford Academic: 51–76.
Finnemore, Martha. 2009. Legitimacy, Hypocrisy, and the Social Structure of Unipolarity: Why Being a Unipole Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be. World Politics 61 (1). Cambridge University Press: 58–85.
Goddard, Stacie E., and Ronald R. Krebs. 2021. Legitimating Primacy After the Cold War: How Liberal Talk Matters to US Foreign Policy. In Before and After the Fall: World Politics and the End of the Cold War, edited by Nuno P. Monteiro and Fritz Bartel, 132–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available at <https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/F4CAE0DB0E685CC19C280E142EEAF0FC>.
Goddard, Stacie E, Ronald R Krebs, Christian Kreuder-Sonnen, and Berthold Rittberger. 2024. Contestation in a World of Liberal Orders. Global Studies Quarterly 4 (2): ksae026.
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Lynch, Marc. 2008. Lie to me: sanctions on Iraq, moral argument and the international politics of hypocrisy. In Moral Limit and Possibility in World Politics, edited by Richard M. Price, 165–196. Cambridge Studies in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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[1] “Joint World Bank, UN report assesses damage to Gaza’s infrastructure,” World Bank Group, April 2, 2024. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2024/04/02/joint-world-bank-un-report-assesses-damage-to-gaza-s-infrastructure.
[2] Agnès Callemard, “Gaza and the end of the rules-based order,” Foreign Affairs, February 15, 2024; Renad Mansour, “Will the war in Gaza become a breaking point for the rules-based international order?,” Chatham House, January 26, 2024.
[3] On hypocrisy, see e.g. Finnemore 2009.
[4] Rationalist institutionalists emphasized the order’s functional and material underpinnings: see, e.g., Finnemore 2009. Others, primarily constructivists, emphasize the spread of liberal rules and norms: see, e.g., Finnemore 2009. Historical institutionalists combined both in emphasizing the processes through which the US built the order. Accounts include Deudney and Ikenberry 1999; Ikenberry 2001.
[5] Ikenberry 2001, 2011; Risse-Kappen 1995.
[6] Finnemore 2009.
[7] E.g., Parmar 2018.
[8] Allison 2018; Glaser 2019; Porter 2020.
[9] See e.g. Goddard and Krebs 2021.
[10] E.g., Krebs and Jackson 2007.
[11] Address before a Joint Session of Congress, September 11, 1990. https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/september-11-1990-address-joint-session-congress
[12] Deitelhoff and Zimmermann 2020.
[13] Goddard et al. 2024.
[14] Finnemore 2009; Bukovansky 2010; Hanrieder and Zürn 2017, 103-105.
[15] See Andrew W. Neal, Exceptionalism and the Politics of Counter-Terrorism: Liberty, Security, and the War on Terror (New York: Routledge, 2009); Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (New York: Routledge, 2009); and Kyle Grayson, Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing: On Drones, Counter-Insurgency and Violence (New York: Routledge, 2016).
[16] For this general argument, see Mills 2008. On race in the liberal international order, see Brown 2024; Anievas and Shilliam 2015; Búzás 2021.
[17] See e.g., Douglas Schoen and Saul Mangel, “Biden’s diplomacy has failed. Now he should fully back Israel’s military action.” The Hill, October 8, 2024.
[18] Henry Foy, “Rush by West to back Israel Undermines countries’ support for Ukraine,” October 18 2023
[19] Ibid.
[20] Lynch 2008.
[21] Patrick Wintour, “Why U.S. Double Standards on Israel and Russia Play into a Dangerous Game,” The Guardian, December 26, 2023.
[22] The Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs was Held in Beijing Xi Jinping Delivered an Important Address at the Conference. (n.d.). https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx_662805/202312/t20231228_11214416.html. Quoted in https://mei.nus.edu.sg/publication/mei-perspectives-series-33-chinas-strategy-in-gaza-a-quest-for-global-south-leadership-fraught-with-peril/#_ftn13
[23] Chow and Levin 2024.